Review: Systemic slavery
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 23, 2012
Judgment was a really strange and different read for me.The system in Judgment was somewhat more difficult to understand. First off, the slaves were all women, and all came into the system non-consensually. The book was told by female Mischief, an American woman kidnapped from an airport by human traffickers.The society is set-up as a hierarchy in a "school" (if you will) of 200 female slaves, and the guards and "headmasters" who oversee them, and an "overlord" who runs the full operation (the quoted terms are my own, not necessarily as written in the book, btw).The women are subjected to tortuous stuff and poor living conditions to break their wills and force them to participate in this society, and eventually they behave so they can move up to the next level of slavery, which has different duties and different privileges, with the ultimate goal of being sold to a kind master or of becoming a personal slave and pampered companion to a "Headmaster" or the "overlord." Our protagonist, the unusually flame-haired Mischief, skips the rank nonsense and basically moves from 'newbie' to 'overlord's beloved pet' in a short period of time, but that's pretty typical of this kind of story, so I'm not knocking it.The real fascination with this story is that Mischief accompanies her Master to the US and gets separated from him, freaks out, and gets picked up by the police.She no longer is emotionally capable of feeding or dressing herself, and has no comprehension of the real world.The narrative flips between the now-Mischief in the hands of the police, and the then-Mischief when she was a newly captured slave.The level of her Stockholm Syndrome is extreme and shocking. That's pretty much all I'm going to say about that.Judgment is what I would call "erotic fantasy" - nothing you'd ever want to live, but interesting if you like reading about alter-society systemic sexual slavery, rough sex, torturous beatings, and a brainwashed protagonist with Stockholm Syndrom. It has all this, and good writing, to boot.There's a lot of time spent on Mischief's capture and the first few weeks in the system, before she settles into her role, then it's a lightening move into the present, and the transition was a little too quick for me. I would have like to have been privvy to more of the conflict that made her dear to her Master, and maybe even a little glimpse into a sex scene that she actually enjoys...