Summary
The title being a play on Dicken’s David Copperfield, Kingsolver instead writes about a boy growing up as a foster child in Appalachia. Surrounded by drugs and poverty, what kind of life can a kid expect? Spoiler: not a great one.
Thoughts
The Good The book is entertaining, and you easily become attached to the main character and are invested in how he turns out. The book is really good at making you feel like you are a dirty, poor, uneducated, overlooked teen. So, if that’s what you’re in the mood for this book delivers. Also, Kingsolver makes decent points about the acceptable and prevalence of racism versus rednecks or hillbillies. She also makes some interesting, yet less convincing, arguments around this discrimination being fueled by the fat cats who want everyone to be part of the money economy (i.e., get everything by paying money) which can be taxed versus land economy (i.e., produce goods like food and clothing off the land) which cannot be taxed. The goal of the book was to enlighten urbanites to the suffering of the poor whites, and to shine a light on the damage caused by pharmaceutical companies which knowingly got entire counties hooked on cheap opiates.
The Bad Stylistically, this book wasn’t for me. No fault of Kingsolver just wasn’t my favorite. Also, my most cynical review would be that the book is 550 pages of Kingsolver torturing a child until she gets bored and slaps a happy ending on it.
The Predictable This could be an extension of the bad section, but I couldn’t resist. The main problem here is the main character. The novel does its best, and mostly succeeds at being realistic, but I didn’t really buy the main character. He is portrayed as having some rough edges, (he talks about boobs, does drugs etc.) but in the end is a sort of papier-mâché boy, cutout to fit the modern urban ideal. That is not racist, not homophobic, not misogynistic, suspicious of capitalism, artistic, and distrusts authority. He has flaws, but manicured flaws like at 20’s movie star’s beauty mark, nothing fatal. This is definitely a nitpick, as I am sure there is an Appalachian foster kid that checks all these boxes out there somewhere, I just find it altogether unsurprising that he is the one that got picked to write about. David Copperfield