Goodreads Monday is a meme hosted by Emily @ Budget Tales Bookblog. The purpose of this meme is to talk all things Goodreads like you want, but it mainly is used to highlight a book that has been on your TBR. My Goodreads TBR is long, so without further ado, here’s my pick for the week.

This week’s Pick:

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

In fact, I haven’t heard of this book before, till I saw an announcement somewhere that it will get translated. Many people seem to like this author’s books, so I thought it would be nice to put it on the TBR. However, I’m not too sure whether it’s worth reading it if you never read classics since this story is based on a Charles Dickens classic. Furthermore, I’m not sure whether I want to read it in Dutch or English.

“Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.” Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities. Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

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Have you read this book and what are your thoughts?