Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver, 2022
Historical fiction Contemporary fictionLiterary fictionYoung adult
A foster kid in opioid-era Appalachia tells his own story with grit, humor, and a voice that refuses to be pitied.
Feels like grief and tenderness.
A page from the book
What comfort feels like when you've learned to live without it.
We both lay back down, and she looked at me in the eyes, and we were sad together for a while. I’ll never forget how that felt. Like not being hungry. Barbara Kingsolver.Kingsolver trained as a biologist and grew up in rural Kentucky; Demon Copperhead won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and retells David Copperfield.
Books that feel like this
More by Barbara Kingsolver
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver, 1998
A Baptist family from Georgia arrives in the Congo in 1959, and each daughter tells what their father’s certainty costs them.
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Questions readers ask
- What is Demon Copperhead like?
- Feels like grief and tenderness.
- What should I read after Demon Copperhead?
- If you liked Demon Copperhead, try My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry (Fredrik Backman), The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold) and Because of Winn-Dixie (Kate DiCamillo).
A taste of the feed
What we actually do with grief, since time doesn't shrink it.
People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn’t true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn’t be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry · Fredrik Backman
What a child sees in a snow globe, and what her father answers.
Inside the snow globe on my father’s desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don’t worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He’s trapped in a perfect world.
The Lovely Bones · Alice Sebold
Grief has a shape, and your tongue keeps finding it.
Thinking about her was the same as the hole you keep on feeling with your tongue after you lose a tooth. Time after time, my mind kept going to that empty spot, the spot where I felt like she should be.
Because of Winn-Dixie · Kate DiCamillo
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