A Pound of Flesh

This book is the follow-up to "To Serve And Submit" and continues the story of slave girl Marja and her captor-turned-hero Lexander. It's a book that would appeal to a readership with an open mind about sexual matters - as someone with pretty traditional views on relationships and fidelity I did find it a little tricky to get my head around the hero sleeping with women other than Marja. The author did write Marja's feelings of jealousy at these events in an effective way but the underlying events didn't work for me in the novel - a form of escapism where we hope that the 'hero' conforms to our own ideas of heroic behaviour and mine are different than Lexander displays. Once again in this book Marja has a tough time but seems amazingly resilient. She gets raped again, suffers jealousy of Lexander's other women, she's afraid for her life, she's struggling with her new-found ability to make decisions and not to instantly obey Lexander and she's seeing killings and other events which obviously she finds highly traumatic. That's part of what makes her such an interesting character in these books - she is a strong woman who's finding herself as we read through her story. I found Lexander less easy to understand, as in the previous book, but the author certainly has an excellent writing style and keeps the action moving at all times. I think it would be pretty tricky to follow this book if you haven't read "To Serve And Submit" as there isn't all that much backstory in "A Pound Of Flesh". As in the other book, a map would have been really helpful, although I understand from the author that this was something she wanted but wasn't possible. You can play an amusing game of spotting the familiar locations in this slightly different world (living near Londinium myself it was funny to read about it) and also the religion of Kristna, a not-at-all veiled poke at Christianity, In summary, this book's sexual worldview is too far from my own for comfortable reading but it's a well-written story and would reward those who feel more at home with this kind of literature.

Not quite up to standing with the first, but still superb. I would only say that they sacrifice the concept of a pleasure house in favor of moral standing to some degree. I would have thought that the story could have gone a little differently but overall the tale was still excellent. Perhaps in the next the story will show how the pleasure houses are replaced with ones that better exemplify the idea of shared passion.

Throughout the land, children are sold to Pleasure Houses where they are trained to become "pleasure slaves" servicing their often abusive masters. Once in a rare moment a slavemaster frees his slave. This happened in Vidaris where former slavemaster Lexander liberated his love slave Marja. Over the objection of Marja, Lexander and his Thule warriors assassinate his former partner Helanas, and burn down Vidaris. By this act he declares his intent to destroy the rotted system by force; officials in turn affirm that Lexander is an outlaw to be killed by his former peers. He and Marja travel Londinium where their next assault is to be on Becksbury by manipulating the Krishna followers into destroying the facility. To gain entrance, Lexander pretends to be an important slavemaster with Marja posing as his slave; roles both know from experience. However, Lexander goes berserk when the local slavemaster viciously beats his Marja. Lexander and Marja split over how to change society as Marja sees how helpless the freed slaves are, while Lexander's insists that all Pleasure Houses must burn and their masters killed with no thought towards the future of freed slaves. This conflict sends the pair on separate journeys in spite of the need to team up when it comes to confronting the house of Saaladet. The sequel TO SERVE AND SUBMIT, A POUND OF FLESH feels in many ways like a feeder book as no major progress on the goal is achieved. Still this is an interesting tale as the sub Marja and the Dom Lexander struggle to do what each believes is the right thing. There are a variety of sexual encounters (willing and not willing) and supernatural beings. Fans who enjoy something different in their reading will appreciate this erotic fantasy though reading the first book enhances the understanding of this exciting thriller. Harriet Klausner