How to Finish a Book that Breaks Your Heart: A Review of Demon Copperhead

The Subject of Tragedy in Appalachia

Sep 05, 2025

I find myself crying this morning.

Crying for a nine year old, 45 pound girl found dead on the banks of the Youghiogheny River. Just about where I pick my husband up after he spends his day fishing. A stretch and curve of water that has always felt idyllic.

Seems it wasn’t a simple drowning, something we have come to expect every summer from our shallow, fast moving river that tricks people into letting their guards down.

The adoptive mother was arrested for homicide.

I watch the extended family being interviewed on Facebook postings. Their faces are the faces of so many of my fellow Fayette Countians. Drawn. Haunted. One doesn’t need proof to understand the look of hard drugs. It’s a different look from hard alcohol. Like all the health has been funneled out of the person. The lifeblood extracted with each needle and pill. Dead eyes. Hollow cheeks. You don’t need to hear the words to see the truth.

I stopped reading the updates and dove into making my tiny, micro mosaic jewelry. Like if I could miniaturize my focus, I could erase the images. With every tiny cut and lay, I was able to block out the horror. Until after dinner when my husband asked if wanted to hear the updates. Cigarette burns, wrapped in a garbage bag, special needs, a girl named after a Twilight character. She never had a chance.

How do the beautiful little children, who would be cherished in the right homes, end up in such evil circumstances?

I don’t know the answer to that. But clearly something is broken in the system.

Which brings me to the book I cannot finish.

I finally opened Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.

Since I have been writing about Appalachia this last year, people keep telling me I need to read it. Now, more than halfway through, I understand.

It has all the subjects that I include in my working list that makes a person Appalachian. I have been making my way, slowly, through each word on my list. The linked words are my finished essays. You can see the few, unhighlighted ones that I have been avoiding. The lines in quotes are Ms. Kingsolver’s that give perfect voice to my words.

Geology “Living in a holler, the sun gets around to you late in the day, and leaves you early. Like much else you might want”
Memory “Live long enough, and all the things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind.”
Connecting the threads
Loyalty “Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. And still we stayed.”
Creativity
Self-reliance
Noncompliance “Other people made up hillbilly to use on us, for the purpose of being assholes. But they gave us a superpower on accident. Saying that word back at people proves they can’t ever be us, and we are untouchable by their shit”
Faith
Escaping versus staying
Tragedy
Isolation

I watched my mother read Demon first.

I watched her internalize its heartbreak and then crash, finding too many threads connected to her own past. I watched her make long delayed, painful change because a book showed her the brutal nature of truth.

A good book stirs you up. A great book changes you.

For the people reading the story of the little red haired Demon, a beautiful boy born with gifts, I deliver a warning. This book is great, but it will break your heart.

A cast of characters worthy of Dickens. Hilarious and horrifying. A contemporary portrait of place. A fictional, but so real, narrative of the oxy wars. A book that tells the story of broken generations.

I may not finish it.

More than halfway through, I take a deep sadness from it about how tragedy doesn’t end when a person dies. It carries through into children who sleepwalk it into grandchildren.

I end with questions.

How does a person break the spellbinding, generational power of tragedy?

How does a child escape the traps set by giant drug companies far out of reach of deserved retribution?

From the rich cast of characters in Demon Copperhead, I identify most with June, the emergency room nurse who moves out to the big city but comes back home, having become radicalized from watching her people being systematically destroyed by tiny prescribed pills that lead to needles and pipes that take away hope. Pills that end with little girls wrapped in garbage bags and dumped on the riverbank.

Like June, I have become radicalized

Because dear little Demon is fictional. But he is also absolutely real. He is that little girl found dead yesterday. He is every real life emergency room nurse who delivers a baby born with fentanyl in his blood and watches the mother lose track of God’s most powerful gift as her child gets passed into a broken foster system.

I am radicalized because I believe any actions that lead to an end to these scenarios are good. And right. And justified.