I don’t often delve into the world of book reviews, but when something leaves me in a heightened state of emotion, I find the best resolution for myself is to blog about it.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver is the story of the titular character, Demon, as he takes the blows delivered by life. A modern retelling of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (which I haven’t read), Demon Copperhead is set in a rural community in the Appalachian mountains and examines the deep-rooted problems of poverty and addiction.
Trying to decide between reading fiction and non-fiction. As usual, fiction won.
Where does the road to ruin begin?
With his father dying six months before he was born, Demon was raised in a single-wide trailer by his mother next door to his best friend, Maggot (Matt Peggot). The book begins in earnest in the late 90s when the boys are 10 years old, and the Peggot’s take Demon on two-week trip to the city. Upon their return, Demon’s mother has married her short-term boyfriend, Stoner, and he’s moved in with them.
I have my own complex feelings when it comes to being a 12-year-old boy and having a bald, tattoo-ed step-father suddenly in the picture that I don’t particularly like revisiting. Within the first 100 pages of Demon Copperhead, I was mad. I had such rage and fury inside my soul at Stoner, and how he showed up and upended Demon’s entire life. His bullshit alpha-dog, macho, ‘my way or the highway’ stance, his proclivity to teach with his fists, his verbal and emotional abuse, I was furious. When he for no real reason banned Demon from seeing Maggot, to standing over the boy and forcing him to scrub the floors several times over while inhaling cleaning fumes for mindlessly tracking in mud, I wanted pain to come to Stoner.
Further to the abuse of a man to a child, Demon Copperhead tells the story of Maggot’s mother, and why she’s in jail. Another horrific, awful tale of cold-blooded abuse and trauma. This was not a good tale to read while I was holding my 3-month-old son.
Demon’s mother was characterised as being an on-the-wagon, off-the-wagon type of person. She’d be sober for months to years until something slipped, and she ended up back in the throes of addiction. One day, Stoner busts into Demon’s room and says “Your mom wants to show you how much she loves you”, then has Demon help his overdosing mother. Fighting tooth and nail against calling 911, until they show up, then he’s the dutiful husband. Scum.
This event lands Demon in foster care, working the tobacco fields for a crusty old farmer. Demon’s mom goes into rehab and things seem to be going well until, on Demon’s birthday, his caseworker informs him that his mother has OD’d on Oxy. Stoner ghosts, and Demon, is left to the state.
At this point, my rage had boiled up into a fire, I wanted divine retribution against Stoner. I didn’t want Demon to get his hands dirty, nothing short of the divine hand of God, personally smiting Stoner from His green Earth would satisfy me. Alas, that’s not how life works. Stoner gets a fresh start, and Demon bounces between foster houses.
The rest of the book is life happening to Demon. He’s a naïve child, but has a strong sense of what is right and wrong. A foster family moves out of state, leaving him behind, he chooses to track down a long-lost relative who finds him a place to live. He takes up Football, ends up being a rising star for the team, he’s pegged as a gifted person, albeit behind due to his foster care’s lack of care. He’s popular, but never loses the sense of inferiority that comes from sleeping behind dumpsters. He’s keenly aware that at any moment, life can get rattled and everything can get snatched away from you, and he’s insular. He refuses to rely on others and knows that he can only stand on his own two feet.
Then a football injury destroys his knee. The whole back half of the book is Demon, falling into the rabbit hole of pain medication and the addiction therein. It seems like everyone in the county is on something, whether it’s Percocets, Oxy, blow, or something else. Demon flunks out of high school, moves in with his girlfriend, Dori, after she loses her father, and the two teen addicts take a stab at playing house. Demon, for all his worth, tries to keep it together, despite the addiction. Unfortunately, and predictably, Dori OD’s and passes away herself. Several characters turn up broken by addiction, other characters die, not necessarily due to someone’s malice, but more thanks to the cruel twists of fate, and Demon eventually finds his way into rehab and gets clean.
In the final chapters, Demon returns to the county and touches all the places that were home to him. He’s duller now, damaged goods. But he’s alive, and that’s something. He revisits several locations and reminisces about how he sheltered in a barn overnight here, and how he was robbed by a hooker over there. These places are quiet now. These places that were so influential and formative are now just, sad, empty, derelict buildings.
The images along the cover are a lot more poignant after you’ve read the book
As I alluded to above, the first 100 pages made me angry. The next 450 pages just made me sad. I sit here with the novel concluded, feeling like a pile of ash. Everything has been burned up, and for a glorious moment, we were alive and bright. Now, it’s destroyed. Gone.
Life doesn’t conclude in neat little bows, and not every storyline gets the ending it deserves. And in this, I feel Demon Copperhead does a pretty good job of emulating that structure. I’m used to fiction having a dramatic climax and resolution, but Demon’s story didn’t really have that. It was like a boot in a tumble dryer, a constant hum accompanied by random bangs, as the shoe hits the walls. The hits of life keep coming, then they ebb for a season, then another tragedy befalls our hero. At the very end of the book, he rides off into the sunset, leaving his county behind. The ending didn’t make me feel good, or resolve any feelings that I had in my soul, some of the characters that I wanted to see more of didn’t return, but it didn’t end in a tragedy. Demon keeps living, when so many others don’t.
Demon Copperhead was a very good read. Emotional, personal, and brilliantly written. I’m amazed that Barbara Kingsolver can write from a perspective that seems entirely outside of her own. It’s intimate, dark, and beautiful. If you can stomach the tragedy that is the opioid crisis, the failures of the foster care system, and the pain that humans inflict upon each other, I highly recommend Demon Copperhead. It’s only March, but I’m almost sure this is going to be my favourite book of this year.
Project Hail Mary begins with an amnesiac astronaut waking up in a room with two mummified bodies, and needs to remember who he is and what he’s doing. Turns out, he’s on a space station hurtling through space. Through a series of flashbacks we learn that the hero, Ryland Grace, a high school science teacher, is humanities sole hope in what is surely to be a cataclysmic event causing the end of all life on Earth.
If you’ve read Andy Weir’s previous books (The Martian and Artemis), then you’ll be acquainted with his voice. Each of the characters are plucky, pun-ridden, and sassy, no matter the situation. While Weir’s writing style offers puns, jokes, and pop-culture references that inject levity and fun, they’re shoe-horned into characters in high leadership positions facing humanity ending crises, it just feels wrong in the end.
What starts as a space flu stealing the heat from our sun, and expanding to dozens of nearby stars, Project Hail Mary establishes the science that forms the bedrock for the rest of the plot. While the mystical astrophage is fantastical, I like that Weir establishes its properties quickly, then has those properties come back again and again to create unexpected problems for the characters to solve. I also like that it feels like Weir has done his homework, just like in The Martian. The Science feels researched and real, and inspires excitement when a character can take a scientific approach and apply logical steps to their situations.
Project Hail Mary is an approachable hard Sci-Fi, first encounter tale, as it’s filled with optimism. Curiosity and excitement are the main emotions the heroes feel and display, which is great for someone like myself who doesn’t read a lot of Sci-Fi in the first place. I got caught up in the adventure and discovery that Project Hail Mary promised, and I was enraptured when Blip-A first appeared. It never got mired down in fear, war, or politics, as many Sci-Fi books do. Rocky very quickly turned into a snarky human-esqe character instead of an alien with its own personality and culture, I nevertheless enjoyed the ride.
The parts that felt contrived were Rocky’s magical material that seemed to be able to fit any situation. On the other hand, I do like that its qualities came back to bite the characters in the ass. Also, once Grace remembered enough about his missions, I felt the flashbacks became unnecessary. It was establishing some of the character qualities that Grace no longer exhibited in the present story. He’s a coward, but he preforms death-defying EVAs without a moment’s hesitation. He’s selfish, but he very quickly sacrifices himself to save his friend. I felt the flashbacks went on just a little too long and near the end, I found myself really wanting to return to the present story.
I enjoyed Project Hail Mary. It was a fun, optimistic adventure, and I recommending it despite my criticisms, especially to anyone who enjoyed the Martian. I don’t think Project Hail Mary will convert those who bounced off Weir’s previous books, but for returning fans, this adventure tickled my love of discovery and was an incredibly fun read.
Spoilers for the book ahead. You have been warned.
I’ve always identified as ‘a reader’. Reading books is a core part of my identity. From the Scholastic book fairs as a child to wandering through giant book stores as an adult, I’ve always loved books. My tastes have drifted from fantasy, to autobiographies, and back to fantasy, but I’ve always been rooted in fiction.
A couple summers ago, my wife took an audiobook out from the library on a lark. She had a bunch of commutes coming up and needed something to fill the time when she was driving in a straight line (thanks Saskatchewan). She saw a book by the author of A Man Called Ove called Beartown was available, and figured she’d give it a shot. She had quite enjoyed A Man Called Ove, and hopefully, this would be another hit.
And it was. But not in the way that we thought it would be.
Beartown is a tiny community in northern Sweden, stuck in the far side of a forest. The factory is dwindling, the economy is sagging, and people are moving away. Any community faced with this hardship has to rally behind something, and Beartown, is a hockey town. The junior hockey team has a chance to compete in the national semi-finals, and actually have a shot at winning! If they do, it would breathe new life into the community. A hockey academy would be built in Beartown, pouring much needed capital into the community. The hockey team represents hope, a light in the cold, dark winter night that Beartown is going though. At the head of that hope is Kevin, the star player. He’s the one who scores the goals, he’s got the skills and drive that could lead him to the NHL, and he’s the one that’s going to lead the Beartown junior hockey team to national victory.
So when they win that semi-final game on their home turf, it’s cause for celebration. A raucous house party where the players are celebrities. Copious amounts of booze consumed by lightweight teenagers leads Kevin to comit a violent act against Maya, the General Manager’s daughter, that tears the town asunder.
Beartown was a difficult read for me on a number of levels. First, I come from a small town in northern Canada. I’m intimately aware of the types of people who are drawn to, and remain in, those communities. I keenly aware in how stupid ‘hometown pride’ is, and how important it is to ‘fit in’, to ‘be a team player’, because get on one persons bad side, and suddenly you’re isolated. There aren’t any new friends to make, new jobs to seek out. Everyone knows, or thinks they know, whatever drama has befallen you.
I left my small town the moment I graduated from high school. At 17 I left it behind and moved to the big city of Winnipeg, only returning to visit once a few years later. My mother now lives in a different small town, where I end up visiting once a year or so, and every time I do, I’ve filled with such disdain. I despise the small communities and the people who choose to live away from the urban centres. I’m fully aware that it’s my own bias, but, it’s the feelings that fill my heart.
So that’s tough point number 1. I think hometown pride is stupid, so reading about a group of people who scream “We are the bears from Beartown!”, people to stay in a dying town because they’re ‘tough’, just makes me shake my head. I don’t have respect for that kind of hardheadedness, but, that’s coming from someone who couldn’t wait to leave their hometown. a hometown where there aren’t a lot of good memories left behind.
Beartown doubles down on the team mentality by putting the hockey team front and centre. Everything is for the team, the individual doesn’t matter, the team comes first. Coaches who’ve poured entire lifetimes into the club are thrown aside by the sponsers who think they know better. The players are idols, getting away with calling their teacher ‘sweet-cheeks’ in class, skipping school, proudly proclaiming that they could fuck any girl at the party. There are no concequences for their actions, because they’re the hockey team.
I’m no longer an outcast, but I sure felt like one when I lived in my hometown. I didn’t fit in, and those who don’t fit in are made keenly aware of it. If the collective turns their back on you, there’s nothing in a small town to seek out. I can’t tell you how much happier I was when I moved to the city and found a group of like-minded individuals. Hell, I wasn’t even that odd, I liked books, anime, video games. I’m a cis-gendered straight man, I can’t imagine the torture that someone who didn’t fit that mould would have felt. In a city, even if a fraction of a percent are of the same mind, it’s still a significant number of people. If there’s drama or a rift within a hobby, there’s other people that you can turn to. It isn’t so insular and suffocating, there’s freedom in being able to piss someone off, without being completely ostracized from your community.
Back to Beartown, and, here’s where the spoilers really set in. Maya, the GM’s 15-year-old daughter, is raped by Kevin, the 17-year-old star hockey player. When I first read the premise of the book, I was really worried that the main conflict of the story was going to be characters trying to cover up the crime so Kevin could play in the final. Instead, as soon as Maya comes forward with her accusations, Kevin is plucked from the bus literally on the way to the final game. Beartown loses the championship, and a rift sets in. Maya is hated by everyone, they cost her everything. “Why couldn’t she just wait until after the game?” “The police shouldn’t be involved, we could have dealt with this internally!” are phrases thrown around by the men in the hockey club.
Fredrick Backman has some really amazing quotes in this book. So many feelings and emotions that I’ve felt in my heart and soul, but never had the words to put them to.
“For the perpetrator, rape lasts just a matter of minutes. For the victim, it never stops.”
“Culture is as much about what we encourage as about what we permit … That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with”
“Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.”
“The love a parent feels for a child is strange. There is a starting point to our love for everyone else, but not this person. This one we have always loved, we loved them before they even existed. No matter how well prepared they are, all moms and dads experience a moment of total shock, when the tidal wave of feelings first washed through them, knocking them off their feet. It’s incomprehensible because there’s nothing to compare it to. It’s like trying to describe sand between your toes or snowflakes on your tongue to someone who’s lived their whole life in a dark room. It sends the soul flying”
“It doesn’t take a lot to be able to let go of your child. It takes everything”
Seriously. If I had been reading this on my ebook, I would have been highlighting so many passages. I loved reading this book and coming across passages that just lit up lights inside my head. Giving words to feelings that I’ve been searching for so long. Backman also leans heavily into foreshadowing, sometimes too much for my liking. Every now and then I would feel a passage was written clumsily, but, as you can tell from my entire blog, this is just the pot calling the kettle black.
Beartown has a deep melancholy feeling to it. The weight of the struggle is almost too much to bear. Between friendship, loyalty, honour, and just plain right and wrong, Backman handles the extremely serious and sensitive subject matter with aplomb. One character I particularly loved was Ramona, the old bar owner who’s been drinking her breakfast for a decade, ever since her husband died. There’s a scene where someone is trying to proclaim that “Hockey makes people do crazy things” and she fires right back “Religion doesn’t start wars, guns don’t keep people. It’s fucking MEN” which, honestly, makes me stand up and applaud. So often we pass off responsibility for actions, make excuses for the horrific things that occur, but at the end of the day. Humans are choosing to hurt humans.
The character who I hated the most was the head coach, David. He was supposed to be this shining example, his strategy for building up the best junior team was to pour love into these boys for the last 10 years. Then, when this happens, he’s quick to say “Don’t want to get into politics, I just want to coach hockey”, as if these boys aren’t humans with lives outside the game. David is a soon-to-be parent, but offers no remorse for Peter, whose daughter was attacked. He only bemoans that they didn’t wait to present the crime until after the game. David buries his head in the sand, and, when it becomes clear that Maya and her family aren’t going to run away from town, he turns tail and takes up the head coach position for the rival town’s team. The cowardice this character displays infuriates me. As a parent, I hated his lack of empathy. As a man, I despised his adherence to the status quo.
Beartown explores a lot of themes, as there are a lot of characters, all with their own lives and struggles. Even if the book is spoiled now that you’ve read this blog post, I still highly recommend reading this book. Fredrick Backman made me feel raw feelings that I didn’t really know were there. I know I’ll be continuing onto the sequel, Them Against Us very soon, which, my wife assures me doesn’t let up on the emotional turmoil.
At the end of the weekend, I was left laying on the couch eating ice cream, feeling utterly destroyed. I had somewhat forgotten, in the age of easy to consume content, that art, real art, makes you feel things. It forces you to look at situations and events that are so far removed from our day to day lives. A Pogrom in Romaina is utterly incomprehensible to me, as is sexual violence, but they’re very real things that happen. When we forget that real people go through these traumas, we’re in danger of becoming complacient. Heaven forbid we ever fall so deeply into our own safe little bubbles and think “These things don’t really happen”. As a parent, I’m plauged with intrusive thoughts of harm befalling my children, and it’s something I have to deal with. I can’t protect my children forever, nor will I rob them from the fullness that comes from adventure and exploration. I’ll equip them the best I can, sit back, chew my fingernails and worry, and kiss their wounds that inevitably come from life. But what I can do, is champion that we as people always need to be better. We cannot protect and glorify those who seek to do harm to others. We need to protect the vulnerable around us, and hold those who live in positions of power accountable for their actions. We need to continue to tell the stories that make us uncomfortable. We need to teach everyone around us that we won’t be complacent when evil befalls our loved ones.
I hope this divergnce from board game reviews has been intresting for you. It’s certianly a very different skill, and while I don’t really feel eqipped to offer substitive critics of the art I engaged with this weekend, these blog posts are an accurate represntations of my thoughts and feelings. My heart has been hurting this weekend, and writing about my feelings is a pretty good band-aid.
I’m keenly aware that this is a board game review blog, and that I’m ill-equipped to offer a proper review on something so outside my wheelhouse, but sometimes you need to step outside your comfort zone. This weekend, I engaged with art that left me emotionally raw, and I feel compelled to share them here. I hope you enjoy this divergence from the regular, cardboard content that normally appears here.
My partner and I love live theatre. One of our first dates, I was trying to impress her and bought tickets to a local production of Pride & Prejudice, and it ignited a love for plays in both our hearts. We’ve been to dozens of plays over the years, but unfortunately, a lot less so since Covid happened and we brought a baby in our household.
This week, my wife organized childcare, procured tickets, and picked me up from my office for dinner and a date. The dinner was a delicious sweet and sour pork belly from Foo, one of the few restaurants that we go back to specifically for that dish. Then we meandered down to the playhouse, and sat down, unaware of the emotion damage we were about to receive.
Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story written by Hanna Moscovitch, directed by Christian Barry, with songs by Ben Caplan & Christian Barry is a dark folktale story about two Romanian refugees, Chaim (played by Eric Da Costa) and Chaya (played by Shaina Silver-Baird), finding each other at the docks of Halifax, waiting in line to get cleared medically. They part ways, but come back together when they meet in Montreal. He’s a plucky 19-year-old, she’s a 24-year-old widow. He remembers her, asks to marry, and she reluctantly consents “If it’s her father’s wishes”.
Much of the story is told through the rough but powerful voice of the narrator, ‘The Wanderer’ (preformed by Ben Caplan). He skips merrily from side to side of the stage, singing of the cold, the joy of matrimony, and the bleakness of fleeing your home. His bushy beard matches his strong baritone, and while his jubilant high notes get the audience clapping in beat, while in the solemn moments you could hear a pin drop. The score mixes folk, rock, and lullaby, utilizing woodwinds, violin, saxophone, and even a megaphone at one point. Chaim and Chaya perform double duty in playing various instruments while The Wanderer narrates.
Living in Montreal where everything is cold, Chaim and Chaya eventually have a baby. Chaim has been working on the railways, good work at $8 a week! One night, he tries to join his friends in watching a film at the theatre, but gets stopped by an anti-Semitic message. Suddenly, a crack forms, and he remembers the pogrom that killed his entire family. He goes home, and his child has a fever. Chaya’s sure it typhus, the ailment that claimed her husband’s life, but the doctor refuses to see her, and she doesn’t know why!
It’s at this turning point that The Wonderer, with a cloth draped over his head, sings a hauntingly beautiful Yiddish melody. My heart was in my throat, not knowing if the child lives or dies. Spoiler, he lives. And the cast goes on to live a full life. Chaya dies at 77, Chaim at 92. They have 4 kids, and 16 great-grandchildren, who all achieve so much.
The story of Old Stock is the true story of playwright Hanna Moscovitch’s great-grandparents. While creative license was taken, the story remains true. It left me contemplating humanity, and how could anyone fathom to hurt other humans! How can people have such hate in their heart that they tear through a community. I reflect on how blessed and lucky I am that I live in a place where me and my child don’t have those worries. We have safety, stability, and freedom.
Old Stock is dark and thought-provoking. I found The Wanderer’s wild energy utterly charming, and encourage everyone to seek out this play. Some parts are crass, and being confronted with the very real suffering that feels so far removed from my daily life left me uncomfortable, the raw emotions I felt are a good reminder of why art is important in the first place. In the age of media, that seems made solely to entertain, it’s a good reminder that art evokes deep and complex emotions. It lets you see a snippet of someone else’s life and story, and sometimes that reminds you that while so easy to just divide humans into Us and Them, we’re all still humans, and the pain we inflict on others is real.
