![]() ![]() Demon becomes a casualty of the “monster-truck mud rally of child services”: case workers who don’t read his file foster parents who are only in it for the security cheque. ![]() If you’re familiar with David Copperfield, then the arc of Demon Copperhead will hold few surprises. It’s all there in Dickens: the weak, infantile mother, ripe for abuse the dead father and the disciplinarian boyfriend turned merciless stepfather the bad odds against which no child stands a chance – and also the outsiders, some loving and others less so, who offer only a limited form of help.ĭickens would have agreed wholeheartedly with Demon’s verdict that “a kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing”. Since his mother is in and out of rehab, Demon is partly raised by the sprawling, warm-hearted Peggot clan. Even in this deprived neighbourhood they stand out by being almost destitute, living between a coal camp “and a settlement people call Right Poor”. Kingsolver’s hero Damon Fields, known as Demon and nicknamed Copperhead for his red hair, is born to a drug-using teenage single mother in a trailer in Lee County, Virginia. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |