May 15, 2023
What Demon Copperhead Gets Right About Appalachia
By Eleanor Buchanan
Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel shows the reality of the opioid and foster care crises in the region without resorting to stale stereotypes.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was originally published by Youth Communication and is reposted here with permission. YC is a nonprofit publisher of teen-written stories and curriculum to help educators strengthen the social and emotional skills of youth.
Barbara Kingsolver dedicates her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Demon Copperhead to survivors of the opioid crisis and foster care. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the book is dedicated to me: I am an Appalachian who was put in foster care thanks to, in part, my father’s opioid addiction.
Reading the novel, I felt vindicated and relieved that the author voiced all the things I want to explain to people who don’t understand where I come from. Transforming Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield and its explorations of institutional poverty in Victorian England into a saga set in the beginning days of Appalachia’s opioid epidemic, Kingsolver compassionately shows how exploitative industries—like logging and coal mining, big-box retailers like Walmart, and pharmaceutical companies like Purdue—have taken advantage of Appalachia for the sake of profit. The resulting opioid epidemic and poverty in the region have led to a child welfare crisis: Kentucky, my home state, had 8,863 youth in care in 2022, up 27 percent from 2012.
In the novel, the main character, Demon, is put into foster care because of his mother’s addiction. His foster parents expect him to “pay his way”—either using his foster care stipend as family income or forcing him to work on farms and junkyards. In one house, he suffers from nicotine poisoning when he is forced to harvest tobacco crops. In another, a barely fed Demon is made to sleep on an undersized air mattress in a dirty laundry room.
