The dedication of Barbara Kingsolver’s searing 2022 novel, Demon Copperhead, is three simple words: “To the survivors.”
Kingsolver expounds more on that in the final words of her acknowledgments at the end of a Pulitzer Prize–winning work that is a modern adaptation of the Dickens classic about marginalized and exploited children, David Copperfield: “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: this book is for you.”
Kingsolver might as well have been writing that to Kentucky running back Ray Davis. The book is for him. It is about him. The main character, to a profound extent, is him.
