OK. I admit it.  I didn’t like this Pulitzer Prize winning novel even a little bit, and to prove that, I am writing this review right under the wire on July 31st and still have 134 pages to go.  I just have not been able to make myself sit down and get through it, but it fits so well into the July update theme of fathers and sons, that I’m making an exception, and listing the book on BookMarks though I haven’t finished it.  I will do so in the next couple of days.  Ugh!

Kingsolver fashions this story of an impoverished orphan’s grim life as a modern day parallel to Charles Dickens’ tale of another famous orphan, David Copperfield.  Demon, in contrast to David, was born in rural Western Virginia to an 18 year old, drug-addicted mother. His father, sharing the name David and red-headed like our hero, had already exited stage left in a car accident, and mother shortly followed via an overdose when Demon was only 6 years old.  This launched a series of nightmarish foster homes until he found his maternal grandmother who fostered him to the coach of the local football team, the Generals.  Along the way we meet his cousins, Emily and Maggot, Fast and Tommy from a foster home, and the coach’s daughter, Angus, a strange group indeed. When it appears that Demon will finally find security and happiness as a star football player, he ditches it all for drugs and a girlfriend even more messed up than him.

Poverty, opiod addiction, crime, health crises—it all adds up to a real downer and given the state of the world today, who needs to spend time reading about disasters that aren’t even real???

This may all have some redeeming value, but at my age, I don’t need to read a depressing epic about how today’s world destroys people of all ages.  It probably makes me an old, grumpy guy.  Probably true.