I suspect I will always remember reading this book from bed, where I was confined due to hip surgery a week prior. Like the protagonist himself, I was brought down by a faulty leg. I even had a bottle for oxycodone to help with the pain, which I looked at critically (and rarely allowed myself to touch) as I devoured this book. These parallels added another element of engagement. 

To say that this book was hard to read would be a severe understatement. Kingsolver pulls you in — in much too close for comfort — to the fucked up lives of her characters and keeps you there for 550 pages, with almost no relief from the pain, suffering, addiction, and predictable fate of her drug-ridden cast of characters. The writing is raw and graphic, told from the perspective of a narrator who is both precocious and naive. Through Demon Copperhead, Kingsolver tells the story of a place as much as she tells the story of a slice of the population that many are quick to judge but not to understand.

Part gorgeous literature, part social commentary, part expose, Demon Copperhead is worthy of the masterpiece label people are attaching to it. The work is complex, bold, and expertly-crafted. It will stay with me for a very long time. 

Why not the full 5 stars? I needed to catch my breath sometimes. I needed just the littlest bit of relief to prevent me from starting to feel numb.