Demon Copperhead: Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction

He said they’re building a four-hundred-million-dollar vehicle to go up and crawl around Mars. I didn’t believe him, but yet I did. You see what people do with money if they have it, it’s two different universes. Theirs and ours.

a good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it.

I had to do the harder English, which was a time suck, reading books. Some of them though, I finished without meaning to. That Holden guy held my interest. Hating school, going to the city to chase whores and watch rich people’s nonsense, and then you come to find out, all he wants in his heart is to stand at the edge of a field catching little boy

All of us living where we got born. Maybe you have to pay extra to mingle.

We all want what we’re used to.

Battle of Blair Mountain, that turned into the biggest war in America ever, other than the civil one. Twenty thousand guys from all over these mountains, fighting in regiments. They wore red bandannas on their necks to show they were all on the same side, working men. Mr. Armstrong said people calling us rednecks, that goes back to the red bandanna

Tommy was watching TV these days, and seeing finally how this shit is everywhere you look. Dissing the country bumpkins, trying to bring us up to par, the long-termed war of trying to shame the land people into joining America. Meaning their version, city. TV being the slam book of all times, maybe everybody in the city was just going along with it

me go see

The aquarium turned out to be the best day of my life. If I ever get to see the real ocean and it turns out better than Undersea Wonders in Gatlinburg, I’ll be amazed.