This is a much-lauded adaptation of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield that takes place in the poverty-stricken Appalachians. It starts off pretty good but when you get over the anthropological novelty of life on society's lowest, most forsaken rung you are left with 350 odd pages of frankly uninteresting growing pains -- the politics of high school football, discovering sex, addiction to painkillers -- all told from the increasingly grating perspective of a meathead teenager. Everything that takes place is completely foreseeable. The first book I haven't been able to finish in years.