Kingsolver took David Copperfield, moved it to Lee County in the far southwest corner of Virginia, and let Dickens do the work he was built for. Damon Fields, called Demon, gets born on the floor of a single-wide to a teenage mother who’s already using. From there it’s foster homes that are really unpaid labor, a tobacco farm, a garbage-strewn house, a coach who sees him as a football asset, and then a knee injury and a doctor with a pad of OxyContin scripts. She wrote it in first person and let him narrate in his own mouth, which is why it works. The larger argument is that the pills were aimed at those counties deliberately, and that everybody outside had already decided the people there didn’t count.
Demon Copperhead