I just finished reading Demon Copperhead and I appreciate you for calling out the authorial intrusions. Kingsolver at times stops the action to turn her characters into clumsy sock puppets that deliver lectures from the perch of her well-worn hobby horse. I’m every bit as liberal as as the author but found the lectures condescending, and inauthentic coming from a character who spends 90% of his time obsessing about sex and drugs.

I also found implausible the stuff about Angus’s Nashville university classmates and professors mocking her accent. Not to mention the whining about attending college with “cake eaters and princesses of capitalism” from a girl who grew up in a mansion with a full-time servant, free use of Daddy’s credit cards, and given a late-model Jeep Wrangler for her 16th birthday. Give it a rest, Angus.

I didn’t hate the book but I also didn’t love it. Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors but this one, while it does have some redeeming qualities, didn’t live up to the hype.