Demon Copperhead & Sourdough Muffins

A story of a boy in the hills of Appalachia and fruit filled discard muffins

Part 1: Good Book 

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2022)

In a nutshell

Demon Copperhead is the story of a young boy born into poverty in the hills of Appalachia. Told from young Damon’s (Demon is a sometimes nickname) point of view, the story spans his birth on the floor of a trailer to his teenager single mother all the way to the cusp of adulthood. Damon faces non-stop challenges from infancy onwards, constantly being put in the care of people who are meant to protect him yet fail to in a stunning variety of ways. Kingsolver uses Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield as inspiration, examining the same themes of childhood poverty and the larger effect on society, and weaves in the damage the opioid crisis had and continues to have on rural America. Damon’s tenacity as he navigates his childhood is equal parts funny, heartbreaking, and suspenseful, and this is one of the best books I’ve read in years.

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Demon Copperhead in three words 

Sad, brave, dark

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Why I was drawn to this book

Once more than three people have recommended a book to me, I usually stop resisting and go get my hands on it. I’m so glad I did—I was immersed from page one and this book was the kind that when I wasn’t reading, I was looking forward to opening again.

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Three things I loved about Demon Copperhead

1. A satisfying ending

I don’t want to give anything away, so I won’t say whether the ending was “good” or “bad”, only that it was a really satisfying way to finish the book. The intensity of Demon Copperhead makes it feel like a very committing read, and I think Kingsolver wrote an ending that avoids being cliched or easy, but wraps up this journey with Damon perfectly.

2. Damon’s voice

Kingsolver’s talent for crafting voice is unreal. It’s easy to forget a woman in her sixties so perfectly captured the voice of a young boy because every sentence reads as genuine, as if Damon was a real person, sitting with me and narrating. Kingsolver also includes a lot of local slang, turns of phrase, and flair.

The dialogue she created between Damon and his best friend was also so believable and accurate in how kids speak to each other, evolving from when they were in grade school living in next door trailers, to high schoolers moving with different social circles.

3. Tiny but heartbreaking details Damon notices about secondary characters

There were so many small asides or anecdotes Damon mentions about characters he encounters in his travels through Appalachian society and foster care that are just a paragraph or two, but really stuck with me. One that stands out is about a boy named Tommy that Damon lives with when they are both foster children on a working farm. While harvesting tobacco, he notices Tommy gathering small flowers and laying them out on top of two small mounds of dirt beside the field. Damon doesn’t ask about it at the time. “But that night after we were in bed, he told me what it was for. His parents were buried out in eastern Virginia someplace, so he’d never gotten to see the graves….he just made them up. Eight different homes he’d been in so far, that he could remember. In every one of them he’d left behind a little set of graves.”

These little details Kingsolver chooses to have Damon include in his narration really show what a sensitive and observant kid he is; qualities that both help and hinder him.

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Notable passage 

“My thinking here is to put everything in the order of how it happened. Give or take certain intervals of a young man skunked out of his skull box, some dots duly connected. But damn. A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing. If you get past that and grown, it’s easiest to forget about the misery and pretend you knew all along what you were doing. Assuming you’ve ended up someplace you’re proud to be. And if not, easier to forget the whole thing, period. So this is going to be option three, not proud, not forgetting. Not easy.”

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Part 2: Good Bread—Sourdough Discard Muffins with Blueberries and Raspberries

Why this choice for this book?

Sourdough started needs to be replenished each day with more flour and water. When you replenish it, you also discard some of the old, mature starter. Discard recipes use that portion of starter that would normally get tossed to make something new, adding that tangy flavour to baked goods, pancakes, and any other number of bread or bread-adjacent treats. I chose to pair Demon Copperhead with a sourdough discard recipe because of the resourcefulness of Damon. His whole life has been characterized by never having enough, not wasting things, and taking the best care he can of the things he does have. I thought a recipe that used an element that would otherwise be discarded as a key ingredient would be a good fit for Damon’s survivalist nature.

Recipe

I used this great recipe, and then added raspberries as well.

Looking forward

Book I’m looking forward to reading:  The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

Music I’m looking forward to listening to: The Record by Boygenius

Bread I’m looking forward to baking: Brioche hamburger buns