King’s Property
Morgan Howell
Del Rey, August 2007, $6.99, 396 pp.
ISBN 9780345496508
Dar is not happy living at home with her hateful stepmother or her sexually abusive father. They give her the creeps but she doesn’t expect to be given to the king’s army when they need the women from her village. The soldiers tell her she is going to be a cook up until the time they brand her so that if she runs away, bounty hunters will return the slave for a fee. When they arrive at the place where the army groups she learns that she will have to help serve the orcs food.
She has heard the stories about these monsters that eat humans but she finds them quite civilized beings with a rich matriarchal culture that fight for the king only because their queen orders them to. When Murdant-kol tries to have sex with her, she turns to the Orc she befriended Kovok-mah for protection and for a place to sleep. Once she does this the female slaves and the solders treat her like a pariah but she will do whatever is necessary to watch out for her orcs who are more humane than humans.
KING’S PROPERTY is about one woman’s struggle to survive as she learns about orcan culture and language. She also learns the rule to survive in the human only camp and thinks it is the height of hypocrisy that women have to sell themselves to get what they need from their partners to survive. Dar finds she loves the orcs and turns on most of humanity because she finds so many of them bullies. Morgan Howell is a bright new fantasy author whose tale holds up against the genre’s writing wizards.
Harriet Klausner
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