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On the Shelf, the miserable are corralled together to meet their fates. Elders are taken away in the Flying Fox and never seen again. The Undertwelves are tattooed with numbers and marched off to the Pits--a worse circle of this inferno, where these Digit Kids are forced to break rocks with splittingpicks until they fall down dead. Thanks to the brave kindness of a coffin builder, 11-year-old Whensday has managed to escape the Pits. She takes refuge for a time helping Tick Burrowman build his bodyboxes, but when she fears he's going to sell her, she runs away to the Bone Trees. There she meets Honeycut and Oakley, two other children who have eluded the Pits, and the three make an effort at raw survival.

Whensday tells this gripping, memorable story with the frankness of a child and in a dialect that reflects the brutal reality of the new world order. In such a place there is no time for proper grammar, and words must be invented for each fresh hell (homes are now mere "life holes," the primary food is "cornslop," and coughed up phlegm is "lungpuddles"). But somehow, amid the horror, Rapp manages to weave impressive beauty and hope. Whensday is a character to fall in love with and root for, who understands "Strength don't always come from muscles and size. Sometimes it comes from that stuff that hides in your spit." Most of all, she helps us appreciate the small things: a bird's nest, a spoon, an elephant made of foil. --Brangien Davis

Product Description
An eleven-year-old girl learns about love, loss, and survival in a bleak post-apocalyptic world ruled by ruthless men.

If there was on good thing though, it HAD to be Oakley Brownhouse. He was hilarious, imagining him as a little nine year old in the stuff he goes through. Its really quite funny.

I just wish the whole book was as interesting.


Worst Book I've Read in 50 Years   April 16, 2000
 5 out of 13 found this review helpful

Story takes place in some undefined post-cataclysmic era,presumably on earth, in which the author paints the bleakest possiblepicture of existence where children are enslaved workers in pits, poisonous rain falls unrelentingly, few living things exist other than humans, and general unimaginable misery prevails on every page.

The author is fond of literary gimmicks such as NOT using quotation marks to identify dialogue but rather using the conventions; I go, or, I went, or, I'm like; followed by the dialogue. It is filled with his own version of word meanings such as quickdust, life hole, digit kids, creature clouds, blackfrost and so forth. No prologue or epilogue sheds any light whatsoever on the causes of the situation.

The subject of the title 'The Copper Elephant' is a large improperly made figure of an elephant as talisman. The maker is an idiot boy who cobbles together bits of aluminum foil and other metals into his version of an elephant which he believes will help him find his missing younger brother...

The characters all speak insufferably bad versions of what we think of as English, deliberately contrived by the writer. Without doubt one of the worst novels I have read in fifty years...END