Copper Sun by Sharon Draper

What a fascinating book!  Copper Sun tells the story of Amari, a 15 year old African girl who witnesses the slaughter of her family and then undergoes unfathomable horrors as she suffers the Middle Passage on a slave ship to America.  The descriptions of life onboard,  or I should say below decks, are excruciating to read; one cannot even begin to imagine the reality that many slaves lived through.  The book alternates Amari’s story (Myna to her white slave owner because “she is mine” ) with the story of Polly, an white indentured servant who must serve out the indenture of both her parents’ –14 years.  As Polly says, by that time she will be an old woman (in her thirties!).  The two girls are the property of the  Derby family, a family whose business is growing rice.  The use the girls cruelly as they do all their property.  The  two girls drew me into their story and made what I  was aware of only intellectually seem much moe real.