I started Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Demon Copperhead over Presidents’ Day weekend. So far, I am very into it: the writing is punchy, the story line gripping. Halfway in, I’m at the point where Demon is a well-liked freshman football star. I’m waiting for Demon’s other shoe to drop. How could I not? I served a year as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) to a seventeen-year-old girl in a small town rife with opioid use, not unlike the setting of this novel.
I had dabbled in volunteer work here and there before becoming a CASA, but I was wholly unprepared for the experience. No amount of court-ordered training videos on trauma-informed care could have prepared me to begin to understand Jane’s (not her real name) reality.