Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤'s Reviews > Demon Copperhead

Demon Copperhead deserves every fiction prize there is. Every single one of them. Even the ones that don't exist.

Many years ago, shortly after I started working at my library, I mentioned to a colleague I had a headache.

"Mabel", sweet and helpful as ever, said to come back to her desk and she'd give me something for it. She pulled out a gallon-size Ziploc bag (that's almost 4 liters, for all the non-United Statians reading this).

Mabel asked me what kind did I want. 'Um, ibuprofen?' I queried, not seeing anything but orange prescription bottles in that see-through plastic bag.

She looked at me and said she didn't have it but any of these pills would help a lot more than ibuprofen would. 

I declined, worried to take prescription painkillers. I worried for her, seeing that big ol' bag.

"You don't take all of these, do you, Mabel?", I asked. 

She said well of course she did, "Jenna, when you get old, you get a lot of different pains and each of these are for a different one". 

With that, Mabel began pulling out bottles, reading the labels as she did. "This here's for my neck. This for my back. Oh, this is the best, it helps my arthritis," she said, shaking a bottle of Oxys. 

She continued pulling out bottles, lining them up on the edge of her desk. I think just about every part of her body hurt and every part of her body had its own pill.

A white-haired, intelligent, professionally employed woman, Mabel wasn't your stereotypical addict. She had been a librarian for decades, the favorite of most of our patrons. But, like every other pain pill addict I knew, Mabel's addiction began in the doctor's office. She wasn't some lowlife just looking to get high. She trusted her doctors and believed them that you couldn't get addicted if you really had pain.

There are so many stories about addiction, some true, some based on the truth. Mabel, while not her real name, was a real person with a real addiction that probably killer her (she had a brain aneurysm which are often brought on by opioids). Not all stories have happy endings.

As for this book and this story, I loved it. Loved it in so many ways and for so many reasons. Barbara Kingsolver, being Appalachian, "gets" Appalachians, us hillbillies. She writes with so much authenticity.

These characters? I know them. They live down the street, they come in the library, they shop at Walmart, pushing their "buggies" full of sugar drinks and sugar cereals, trying to get the most amount of calories for their kids for the least amount of dollars.

Ms. Kingsolver also "gets" the pain pill/heroin epidemic, how and why it started, and how greedy pharmaceutical CEOs and everyone under them, down to both the equally greedy doctors and the well-meaning but witless ones, destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives.

There is a lot about addiction in these pages, but there's so much more than that. It is real and deep and emotional and rip-your-heart-out stuff. It is what Hillbilly Elegy could have been if JD Vance wasn't such a stuck on himself braggart asshole. 

Young Demon Copperhead had me from the very first page. I knew this kid, I'd seen him grow up, and watched him grow up all over again through the pages of this book. I cannot praise it highly enough, trite as those words are. It's difficult to find words to describe it - again trite, but the truth. 

If you want a book that is going to suck you in and hold you rapt and take you on a roller coaster of emotions, Demon Copperhead is the book for you. Don't be intimidated by the length. As another friend wrote in her review (hey, Diane 👋🏼), "it needs every word to get this story told."