DEMON COPPERHEAD by Barbara Kingsolver
It’s the early aughts and opioids are passed out like candy in the small rural confines of Appalachia. Demon’s parents are both dead and he gets passed around through the flawed and scary system of foster care. By middle school he’s an expert at survival. Lucky for him, he has two teachers who see potential and an “adopted” aunt who cares about what happens to him. Also, his size and athletic talents are put to use on the football field until he blows out his knee and is put on pain medication. A contemporary version of Dickens’ David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead is a work of genius in the scope and magnitude of Kingsolver’s ability to show us the gritty underside of rural poverty and addiction at the hands of pharmaceutical companies. The story is sad but hopeful. The pacing of this novel is a work of art. The writing sublime. You won’t forget Demon, ever. He’s as real as they come.
Favorite line(s): In ours, you live on a tether: to family, parents if you’re lucky, older people raising you if less so, that you yourself will end up looking after by and by. Odds are about a hundred to one, you are not destined for greatness. Your people will appreciate you all the same. On the other hand, if you poundcake someone or push them too far in the shame or shock direction, you will run into their people at Hardee’s or the Dollar General parking lot, in all probability within the day. There will be aftermaths. Same goes for raising your head too high on your neck, the tall weed gets cut. So. You wind up meeting in the middle on this follow-your -heart things, at a place everybody can live with. Show me that universe on TV or the movies. Mountain people, country and farm people, war are nowhere the hell. It’s a situation, being invisible. You can get to a point of needing to make the loudest possible noise just to see if you are still alive.
WE RUN THE TIDES by Vendela Vida
Set in the 1980s in the tony town of Sea Cliff overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, We Run the Tides is the coming-of-age story of thirteen-year-old Eulabee and her friendship with the magnetic Maria Fabiola. Both Eulabee and Maria know how to run the tides of the Pacific, timing their climb over the rocky cliff between China Beach and Baker Beach just right so as not to get stuck on one side or the other or sucked out to sea. This is a metaphor for the novel as Maria’s lies rupture the duo’s friendship. Mixed with mystery (a kidnapping) and the emotional wallops of sexual awakening and a sense of place give Eulabee’s story heft as the adults move cluelessly in the world.
Favorite line(s): We are thirteen, almost fourteen, and these streets of Sea Cliff are ours. We walk these streets to our school perched high over the Pacific and we run these streets to the beaches, which are cold, windswept, full of fishermen and freaks. We know these wide streets and how they slope, how they curve toward the shore and we know their houses.
THE HUNDRED-YEAR HOUSE by Rebecca Makkai
The “house” of the novel is Laurelfield, built at the turn of the century by the Devohr family. A portrait of Violet Devohr, a casualty of a loveless marriage and suicide, stares down at the house’s inhabitants over the century. In the 1920s the house operated as an artists’ colony. In the 1950s, it reverts back to a single-family home complete with a staff where Grace Devohr and her louche of husband live. In the 1990s, Zee, a Devohr descendant, and her husband Doug live in the coach house on the property. What ties the decades together in this structurally ambitious novel is how the inhabitants of Laurelfield reinvent themselves through the revelation of secrets and the examination of human relationships. Read this over a long weekend—otherwise, the thread of this epic story might be lost on the reader.
Favorite line(s): From 1929 to 1954, forty novels, seven symphonies, fifteen dances, around three hundred stories, and over five thousand poems were completed at Laurelfield. Six times as many of each were begun or continued. Which isn’t to mention the concertos and memoirs, the photographs and charcoal sketches. Seventy love affairs were begun, and forty-two were ended. One woman died in the bathtub. A poet hanged herself in the woods. A violin was hurled from the roof. Eight children were conceived. Between 1938 and 1945, seven Jewish artists from western Europe were allowed indefinite stays.