Demon Copperhead

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.

Entertains while teaching

It's not often that being called Demon Copperhead would be considered the least of a person's problems, but that's certainly the case here. Born on the floor of their trailer home to a drug addict mother, young Demon manages to have quite quite a pleasant childhood with his brother-in-terrible-name Maggot until his mum shacks up with a new man. Thus begins the rollercoaster of Demon's life, suffering through awful situations to seize a ray of hope then be brutally shoved right back into darkness.

Get a part time job? All your money is taken by your foster family as 'rent', and by the way you're working for a meth lab. Take that money back and escape in search of your grandmother? Some hooker steals your money by claiming you stole it from her. Star player on the high school football team in a small country town? Believe it or not, probably the worst thing that happens to him.

Despite the truly awful cast of human antagonists the main villain turns out to be Purdue Pharma in a surprise reference to the real-world opiod epidemic they gleefully caused. This book came out in 2022, which is around when I learned it was a thing, but apparently it'd been public knowledge from at least 2019. As always fuck Purdue, truly an excellent example of how the people running corporations justify ruining millions of lives to make number go up.

The book is surprisingly good despite probably sounding like suffering porn from my description, there are long stretches where things go well to OK for Demon and there's always at least a ray of hope to cling to. By far the longest book I read on our honeymoon but I powered through it cos it was so gripping, definitely give it a try.