Kingsolver took David Copperfield, moved it to Lee County in the far southwest corner of Virginia, and leaned on Dickens for the rest. Damon Fields, called Demon, is born on the floor of a single-wide to a teenage mother who’s already using drugs. From there, it’s foster homes that are really unpaid labor, a tobacco farm, a garbage-strewn house, a coach who sees him as a football asset, and then a knee injury and a doctor with a pad of Oxy scrips. She wrote it in first person and has him narrate. The larger argument is that the pills were aimed at those counties deliberately and everybody outside had already decided the people there didn’t count.
Demon Copperhead