 | Dickens’ David Copperfield brought to contemporary South Virginia is a worthy winner of both the Pulitzer and Women’s Prize. It’s a story of inequalities, addiction, child protection failures and attachment to community and land. Demon’s voice grabbed me from the first page and never let go and the tragedies of his early childhood – kidult mother; dead-end education; foster carers starving the children and working them like slaves – wrenched my heart. True to the source material, it’s not totally bleak: people do care for Demon, although not always with the power to put things right. |
I found the second half, when Demon is in his mid-to-late teens, a little preachy, although I can’t criticise an author for bringing opioid addiction and the politics of rural poverty to light. The parallels between the country-bumpkinisation of people from that part of the country and more obviously oppressed minorities was certainly interesting but might have had more impact if I’d had any preconceptions of the people from the Appalachian Mountains. However, the notion that the rural poor are ridiculed in popular culture as a means of social control – isn’t foraging from hedgerows rather than dumpsters an affront to capitalism? – was an eye-opener, and a welcome one.
One of my favourite reads of the year.
One of my favourite reads of the year.
| We often speak of kids like Demon as having to grow up too fast. But can humans ever mature fully without the foundation of secure childhood? That’s what I had in mind as I approached this weeks last fiction challenge to write 99-word story about someone or something that is immature. |  |
Too much too young
At four, he could change his sister’s nappies and drag his mother out of bed in time for work. At eight, he’d yet to grasp his ABCs but was an expert reader of his stepfather’s moods. At twelve, in foster care, he fought off his sister’s abuser and went hungry so she could eat. Of course he was branded a liar, a troublemaker, difficult to place. At sixteen, he was a regular in the court room, until the judge decreed enough was enough. She had no choice but to send him to prison. The teenager was selfish, irresponsible, immature.
At four, he could change his sister’s nappies and drag his mother out of bed in time for work. At eight, he’d yet to grasp his ABCs but was an expert reader of his stepfather’s moods. At twelve, in foster care, he fought off his sister’s abuser and went hungry so she could eat. Of course he was branded a liar, a troublemaker, difficult to place. At sixteen, he was a regular in the court room, until the judge decreed enough was enough. She had no choice but to send him to prison. The teenager was selfish, irresponsible, immature.
If you enjoy fiction on themes of social justice, narrated in a unique voice, you might enjoy my short series about a woman shut away for fifty years in a psychiatric hospital. Click on the image to learn more.
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