by Barbara Kingsolver, 2022, Audiobook narrated by Charlie Thurston, HarperAudio

I had high expectations for this book as it had won the Pulitzer Prize and it was being compared to Huck Finn and Catcher in the Rye. Although Kingsolver did a very good job characterizing Demon, I felt the book was somehow missing something. It touches on the hidden talent that Demon had as an artist, but it didn’t build on it. It also referenced the plight of the “hillbillies” of Appalachia but didn’t follow through on the topic. Finally, the book totally left out the struggles that Demon may have gone through to come clean of his drug addiction. So, in summary, I felt a bit cheated by what the book could have been and didn’t focus as much on what it actually was.

For these reasons, I can’t give this book a really high rating. I recall some of Kingsolver’s early books (Animal Dreams, The Bean Trees, and Pigs in Heaven) and I find them to be more pertinent.

Note that I hadn’t read David Copperfield, on which this book was apparently modeled. I did, however, read Great Expectations, which I found to be similar, but a much better work of fiction in my opinion.