barbara kingsolver pigs in heaven summary

Cool relief, baby, let’s you and me go cruising Main. I stopped caring around this point because the little white submarine-shaped pill he’d given me to swallow was starting to sing its pretty song in my head. “The prescription would hold me until then. Unlike Demon’s earlier crush, flirtatious and manipulative Emmy (one of Maggot’s countless cousins), Angus is ruthlessly honest, and unlike almost everyone else he knows, her aim is to go to college and move to a city - an unthinkable leap to Demon.įor a brief shining moment, Demon is a football star (and Kingsolver made me care about high school football, no mean feat). Furthermore, he sees linebacker potential in Demon, even though he’s not yet 12 years old.Īnd there’s the coach’s daughter, Angus. Coach Winfield’s teams win games, and hence he is regarded as a god walking upon the earth. The stepfather is a truck driver named Stoner, who wastes no time abusing his new wife and kid.īetsy Woodall turns out to be eccentric but, in her own peculiar way, loving, and she turns Demon’s luck around, finding him a foster home where his guardian is the football coach for the local high school.

His happy early childhood, spent roaming the woods with Peggot grandson Matthew (inevitably dubbed Maggot) and being doted on by his mother (when she’s not in rehab), comes to a screeching halt when she remarries. Kids being kids, young Damon acquires the nickname Demon early on Copperhead comes not from the snake but from his copper-penny hair. The first name comes from his father, a mysterious figure who died in an accident before his son was born.

Demon Copperfield isn’t his real name - his sweet, hapless mama names him Damon Fields. Peggot and her vast extended clan will be the closest thing Demon has to a family.

He emerges still wrapped in the caul and struggling for his life from the first second like “a little blue prizefighter,” as his deliverer, Mrs. He’s delivered by a neighbor after she discovers his widowed teenage mother passed out drunk. “Demon Copperhead” isn’t Kingsolver’s autobiography, although she did grow up in rural Kentucky, not far from the territory where her title character and narrator is born, in spectacularly dramatic fashion. Dickens called “David Copperfield” his “darling,” his personal favorite among all his many novels - in part, no doubt, because it’s the most autobiographical of his books.

Barbara kingsolver pigs in heaven summary