Copper Sun is a 2006 young adult novel by Coretta Scott King Award-winning author Sharon Draper.

When Draper traveled to Ghana, West Africa, she visited the Cape Coast Castle Point of No Return.

She meets up with Besa, who is going to the elders of the village, claiming to have seen strangers who have "skin the color of goat’s milk.” She goes back to her family's home, uneasy.

After exchanging gifts, the village storyteller, Komla, who is Amari's own father, starts telling tales about the past.

Amari, along with the surviving villagers and a few other groups of captives then arrive at Cape Coast, in what is nowadays Southern Ghana.

There, she is thrown into a prison with other women, having lost their families in the mass genocide, who were now hostile, where she befriends a lady called Afi.

Amari initially resists, but after being slapped in the face by the white man and hearing advice from Afi, she suffers while he probes her.

Then, the women are bought by the thin white man and sent through a long, narrow tunnel in the side of the wall.

The women were then led out by their captors, and Amari watches as the men are loaded into a small boat, and taken to the larger freighter.

They are pushed into the cargo hold aboard the freighter, which smells terrible due to the men urinating and defecating wherever they can.

When they arrive at Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, they are inspected and then brought to a prison, where they are told that they will stay there for 10 days to make sure they do not have any diseases, such as smallpox.

On a deck to one side of the clearing is an indentured young woman named Polly, who thinks of the soon to be enslaved Africans as inferior.

Mr. Derby, a large, noticeably greasy man buys Amari and Polly after auctioning with other plantation owners.

The wagon ride to Derbyshire Farms is very uncomfortable for Amari and Polly, who are belittled by Clay and Mr. Derby the few times they speak up.

"[5] Beverly Almond noted that the novel expresses “unimaginable hardship” and “starvation and disease.”[6] Another critic claimed that the book showed themes of "pain, hope, and determination" and "human exploitation and suffering.