I haven’t read David Copperfield (but I have read a bunch of Dickens), and this is the first of Kingsolver’s for me.

But! This book was dull.

The first 200 pages were absolutely riveting. The narrator’s voice is unique, insightful, funny and makes you want to read sections out loud. Like Shuggie Bain narrated by Gus from Lonesome Dove. I was hooked for the first third.

Then it slowed to a crawl, and the storytelling got closer to an epic After School Special, or a CW-calibre remake of Friday Night Lights. It was suddenly predictable and unoriginal. All the looming foreshadowing kind of goes unfulfilled. This story has been told before, and style is no substitute for substance. It often reminded me of a fictionalized Hillbilly Elegy — even down to the protagonist being not much more than a spectator in his own story. The opioid crisis vs. Appalachia — not exactly new ground in 2022.

I felt like there was a good 3-400 page novel in here. Maybe the ambition of mirroring the Dickens novel was misplaced, maybe if the book had come out in 2017 it would have felt less cliched.

Whatever the case, it was a bit of a bust for me. Which is a bummer, because the narrator is an all-time great. Maybe I’ll pick up a copy of Dickens and see if that adds context.