DEMON COPPERHEAD by Barbara Kingsolver ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“If you’re standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight.”

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It can be incredibly hard to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. There’s so much missing context, so many things you don’t know that you don’t know. Maybe all you can say for sure is that they have it easier or harder than you, but even that is a guess. You don’t know their battles or their roadblocks, not really. Do we ever truly know anyone else’s but our own?

If you want to read a book that manages to take you to that place -- into another person’s world and their personal versions of heaven and hell -- this is the one.

Not since reading East of Eden have I felt like I was reading a masterpiece. The control of the narrator’s voice was clear from page one, and I just let it take me from there. And damn did it take me on one hell of a coming-of-age journey through the pitfalls of our country.

There’s harsh realities to deal with here. It’s not sugarcoated, just told with tragic skill. Everything that Demon experiences has surely happened to many unfortunate kids growing up in certain parts of the country (being used and abused not exclusive to Appalachia). But this is an authentic account of what that slice of America has dealt with the last 25 years. Get knocked down, get up halfway, get knocked down farther, harder. The tough days trickle down through families until the children are forced to grow up fast so they can be sucked into the same machine as the parents. This is true adversity, one crafted into our society and told with raw emotion. It makes your stomach turn and your heart hurt. And it’s real.

This reminded me of growing up in a small town. How prideful people can be, even when there’s not much to claim or own. And how everyone everywhere makes their own traditions, their own culture, their own web of stories and drama to give them something to do. We all want to be part of something, even if it’s destructive. Not everyone has the choice.

If there’s any light-heartedness in here, it’s in the nostalgia. The way being young feels like opportunity, even if in some cases the opportunity is severely limited. There’s a resilient, underlying hope throughout. I sure had hope that there would be some end to the trauma cycle. Somebody that makes it out alive. On his way to hopefully being that rare survivor, whether he means to or not, Demon slowly realizes there are parts of life that are worth cherishing, a feeling so unique to discovering the world for the first time that we easily forget about it once we wake up from our childhood dreams. Maybe we even avoid it, not wanting the vulnerability of being let down or thinking the universe might have finally got something right for a change. But Demon is that hopeful heart from the beginning, and Kingsolver does a Pulitzer-prize winning job of serving it to us all the way to the end.