A novel that puts you inside the suffering from the opioid crisis

Barbara Kingsolver has been called an activist novelist. That phrase “activist novelist” worries me as novels where message comes before story invariably fail, but the four novels I’ve read by Kingsolver all seem to me great successes. She’s written about undocumented immigrants, feminism, climate change, and now the opioid crisis.For Demon Copperhead, her novel on the opioid crisis, which has just won the Pulitzer Prize, Kingsolver has a “genius friend,” Charles Dickens.1 Her novel is based on David Copperfield, Dickens’ “impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society.” Kingsolver says her novel is “For the kids who wake up hungry in those dark places every day, who’ve lost their families to poverty and pain pills, whose caseworkers keep losing their files, who feel invisible, or wish they were.”I’m a great believer that “the truth is in the fiction,” and Demon Copperhead brings you closer…
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