Purchase
Atheneum
January 2006
On Sale: January 3, 2006
304 pages ISBN: 0689821816 EAN: 9780689821813 Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Young Adult
When pale strangers enter fifteen-year-old Amari's village,
her entire tribe welcomes them; for in her remote part of
Africa, visitors are always a cause for celebration. But
these strangers are not here to celebrate. They are here to
capture the strongest, healthiest villagers and to murder
the rest. They are slave traders. And in the time it takes
a gun to fire, Amari's life as she's known it is destroyed,
along with her family and village.
Beaten, branded, and dragged onto a slave ship, Amari is
forced to witness horrors worse than any nightmare and
endure humiliations she had never thought possible --
including being sold to a plantation owner in the Carolinas
who gives her to his sixteen-year-old son, Clay, as his
birthday present. Now, survival and escape are all Amari dreams about. As she
struggles to hold on to her memories in the face of
backbreaking plantation work and daily degradation at the
hands of Clay, she finds friendship in unexpected places.
Polly, an outspoken indentured white girl, proves not to be
as hateful as she'd first seemed upon Amari's arrival, and
the plantation owner's wife, despite her trappings of
luxury and demons of her own, is kind to Amari. But these
small comforts can't relieve Amari's feelings of
hopelessness and despair, and when an opportunity to escape
presents itself, Amari and Polly decide to work together to
find the thing they both want most...freedom.
Awards , , January 2007
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
|