The Osher Book Club

Featured Speaker: Eileen Coblens

At this quarter’s Osher Book Club meeting, we will discuss Barbara Kingsolver’s remarkable Pulitzer-prize-winning novel Demon Copperhead. Modeled after Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead brings the story of an orphan beleaguered by the foster care system into twenty- first century Appalachia. Kingsolver’s brilliant achievement goes beyond a critique of the social- services system and into the effects of football stardom on vulnerable high-school students, and, most powerfully, the opioid crisis. Demon Copperhead tells the story of the sensitive and talented Damon Fields (aka Demon Copperhead), son of a single mother too young and damaged to care for the child she clearly loves, as well as the people who hurt him and those who help make him strong. Among Kingsolver’s many gifts as an author, she has created in this book strongly drawn and
memorable characters, most especially that of the narrator, whose compelling voice will continue to haunt the reader. Kingsolver said in an interview that she deliberately paralleled the Dickens novel chapter by chapter, so it might be fun to reread that classic before the class meets.

Presenter Biography

Eileen Coblens has been living full time in San Diego for over nine years after moving from New York. A former middle-school English teacher who, on retirement, spent several years as an adjunct assistant professor at Stony Brook and Hofstra universities, Eileen holds a B.A. and M.A. from Adelphi University and a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Stony Brook University.