![]() Yet, rather than feeling for the characters’ wasted and brutalised lives, the reader is too busy focusing on Kingsolver’s virtuosic reworking of their models. She writes in an afterword that she wants to counter ‘hillbilly stereotypes’ and draw attention to ‘the limited choices and suffocated hopes, poverty built into a region by historical design’. But her fidelity to Dickens’s plot is an increasing distraction. Kingsolver knows, as Demon says, that a good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it, and a large part of the pleasure lies in seeing what she does with her source material. Everyone was superstitious about the snakes. He was born in Lee County, a place known to be crawling with copperheads (3). This is why Demon is a sucker for the superhero rescue (2). ![]() The Peggots found her trying to slap the life back into him after he was born. Only Uriah Heep (here U-Haul) and the Micawbers (the McCobbs) are poorly integrated into her scheme. In Chapter 1, Demon’s mother was 18 when she had him. ![]() The parallels proliferate Kingsolver even has Emmy living in ‘a geographic dome… like a boat turned upside down’, redolent of Mr Peggotty’s ‘black barge’. ![]() Like David, Demon is reunited with Betsy, an elderly female relative (here his grandmother), and her disabled brother Dick (thankfully without King Charles’s head), before going to live with Coach Winfield and his daughter Agnes, whom he initially takes for a boy, and falling in love with the drug-addled Dori, who, like Dora Spenlow in the original, has a snappish dog named Jip. ![]()
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