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Cover of Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Literary Fiction · Free kit

Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver

Lee County, Virginia, at the start of the opioid years: Damon Fields is born on a trailer bathroom floor to an eighteen-year-old mother already underwater, and the neighbor who kicks the door in will later call him a little blue prizefighter. Everyone else calls him Demon Copperhead — copper-wire hair, a Melungeon father already dead at the Devil's Bathtub, a kid who keeps asking for the ocean. Kingsolver retells David Copperfield through a tobacco farm that bills itself as a home, a high-school football house, a feed-store love story, and a county where the pills arrived before the help did. The voice is funny on purpose. The ledger is not.

“Save or be saved, these are questions. You want to think it's not over till the last page.”

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Reading schedule · Book vote

Demon Copperhead Icebreakers

Answer in under 30 seconds. These connect to the book’s themes without spoiling the story.

  1. Personality Reveal

    1. Are you the person who keeps showing up for a messy friend, or the person who writes the honest deadline and means it?

  2. Personality Reveal

    2. When a room decides who you are in the first five minutes, do you correct them or start performing the version they already bought?

  3. Personality Reveal

    3. Is your survival skill joking first, planning first, or going quiet until the weather changes?

  4. Funny & Light

    4. What snack from a gas-station checkout would you defend as a real meal?

  5. Funny & Light

    5. What childhood nickname would you like stricken from the record, and what would you replace it with?

  6. Funny & Light

    6. Name a place you have only seen on a screen that you still talk about like you have been there.

  7. Would You Rather

    7. Would you rather be famous in a small town for one season, or quietly good at one thing nobody cheers for?

  8. Would You Rather

    8. Would you rather have one adult who stayed, or three adults who were brilliant and temporary?

  9. Would You Rather

    9. Would you rather tell the true story of where you come from, or the version that gets you invited back?

  10. Hot Take

    10. Hot take: grit is just what we call luck when we do not want to talk about who helped. Agree or disagree?

  11. Hot Take

    11. Hot take: a funny narrator can make a brutal story easier to hear, and that is not always a kindness. Agree or disagree?

  12. Hot Take

    12. Finish this sentence: "The most useful person in a crisis is the one who _______."

  13. Personal Connection

    13. Who was the neighbor, teacher, or coach who treated you like you were already a person — not a project?

  14. Personal Connection

    14. What is one ordinary landscape you still measure yourself against — a ridge, a parking lot, a stretch of water?

  15. Personal Connection

    15. Name a skill you learned because nobody was coming — cooking, drawing, lying politely, fixing a thing.