Copper Sun, Posted by Mrs. Schauer

COPPER SUN, by Sharon Draper
AR: Yes
Interest Level: Middle/Upper Grades
Audiobook Available in HS Library

I have to admit that I wasn’t excited about this book at first. I had seen it in the bookstore and it just wasn’t one that reached out and grabbed me. Boy, were my first impressions wrong! I listened to the audio book during my drive to and home from the book conference and it definitely made the time fly. As the book opens, the reader learns how fifteen year old Amari’s tranquil life in an African village is forever changed when it is pillaged by white slave traders. Most of her family is murdered and she is taken on an inhumane journey across the ocean to the Americas. Once there, she is given as a birthday gift to the spoiled son of a wealthy plantation owner. She finds an unlikely friend in Polly, an indentured girl who is purchased by the same man. When the master’s wife delivers a long-awaited baby and it is obviously a black child, the reader learns that the plantation mistress has been carrying on an affair with her personal male slave. After the master murders both the slave and the newborn baby, Polly, Amari and the son of Teenie, another slave, escape and head to Fort Mose, a Spanish colony in Florida, where all people are free. I fell in love with the characters in this book. I must have been a sight driving down the road, because I cried through most of this book.