Another phenomenal YA book

Sorry it's been a bit since I posted. I came down with the nasty flu that seems to be floating around Pittsburgh.

One of the good things about being sick is, when I wasn't sleeping, I could read. And one of the books I read was Copper Sun, by Sharon Draper. It was absolutely amazing, and I highly recommend it.

Copper Sun is about a fifteen-year-old African girl named Amari. She loves watching her father weave, playing with her little brother, avoiding the chores her mother gives her around the village. She's engaged to be married. And then one day a band of pale-faced men carrying firesticks comes to her village, kills all the elderly people and young children, and forces the young and healthy to walk in chains to the port. They are then sold, forced onto a boat and carried across the ocean to South Carolina. Once there, Amari is sold to a man who gives her to his sixteen-year-old son as a birthday gift.

Draper does an excellent job of relating what the every day life of a slave was like. Because the subject matter is intense, so is the story...but Amari is a proud, strong and intelligent young woman who never gives up her hope of freedom. Although her innocence is shattered by the kidnapping and subsequent degredations she experiences, she quickly learns what she must do to survive, makes friends, and discovers that not everything (or everyone) is what it seems.