![]() Her boy hero spends his earliest days inseparable from his best friend, “Maggot”, playing in the woods and messing around in creeks lined with mud “that made you feel rich – leaf smelling, thick, of a colour that you wanted to eat”. ![]() With its bold reversals of fate and flamboyant cast, this is storytelling on a grand scale ![]() It’s an intensely personal mission for Kingsolver, who grew up in Kentucky versed in a language that, as she puts it in her acknowledgments, “my years outside of Appalachia tried to shame from my tongue”. “You can’t deny, it’s got a power to it,” he observes, and so does his voice, summoning in its singularity the likes of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield while hailing from a very different demographic.įor this is a novel that testifies to the experience of some of the earliest casualties of the opioid crisis, in particular the hollowed-out communities of Appalachian America, who tend to feature in the wider culture solely as the butt of jokes – they’re moonshiners, hicks, rednecks. He grows into a wild boy with red hair inherited from the dead father he never knew, and before long the nickname “Demon Copperhead” has stuck. ![]()
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