You know, whatever item you just bought you usually like to look at it thoroughly, inside and outside, once it is in your possession. Buying is one satisfaction, but it would be only half the joy if you had to renounce on the excitement of touching your new acquisition, of holding it and trying it out, which in the case of a book usually very straightforwardly means: reading it ! Now I do not know, what you prefer, but I enjoy reading a book word for word, and I am rather unhappy if I can not get the “Behind the scenes”-bits and pieces like the place where the book was published, and the statement whom it was dedicated to.

“The Slave” by Laura Antoniou is in its 2nd edition and respective 5th reprinting since it was published, which is a good record for a book that was published until the beginning of the new millennium. Connoisseurs of Antoniou’s works will probably smile at such detailing, after all we are dealing here only with book two in the successful “Marketplace”-series, which includes a fair number of titles and has built over the years a steady group of readers. And just about everywhere: look at the editor’s note on page five, urging “Attention colleges and universities: Quantity discounts are available on bulk purchase of this book for educational purposes, fund raising or gift giving. For information contact…”

So here we are, Antoniou has found her way into colleges and universities for mainstream educational purposes and there is absolutely no reason for us why we should ignore evidence and not appreciate a text we can learn from. The book, simply entitled “The Slave” is therefore in no need of a more sumptuous denomination, setting out very clearly from the start what it is dealing with.

This is the story of Robin, the character the author introduces to us through a sort of psychological analysis, going much further than the casual descriptions of the history of fictional individuals. “I am different than everyone else, she once observed, looking at herself in the mirror… When the other girls are talking about make-up and hair, and which boy likes them, I’m thinking about being kidnapped.” But the picture is complicated: “To the rest of the world, she was perfectly normal, smarter than average… No one knew that she deliberately sought out books about slaves and prisons and societies which maintained second an third class citizenships.” And it this was not difficult, it can be still more, because “she was a teenage feminist. Who had evil thoughts.”

What follows, is the narration of a girl’s evolving interest in submissiveness, before the background of contradictory feelings. When, at college, Robin meets Chris Parker to train her, the kind of relationship that develops between the two is that of a more sophisticated version of the old game between master and slave. With nearly 300 pages of text and chapters altering between long and short, the novelist still leaves sufficient room for the reader’s own imagination to decorate the process the heroine – literally forcibly - goes through. One of the pleasures of reading Antoniou consists in her ease of introducing humour and even slight mocking of the BDSM-scene in her descriptions, all by maintaining suspense and conviction. In fact the whole book is very enjoyable when you like to read a text that goes deeper than the normal SM-novel, and which in turn also demands a greater effort from the part of the reader.

When Robin, under the supervision of Chris, arrives at the marketplace, she has already graduated from college. Has she ? The change from training period to the employment as a professional slave achieved, there is surprisingly more that needs to be learned from day-to-day life. So in a way the book corresponds very well with the editor’s announcement mentioned before: It is all about educational purposes for both the characters and the readers. What a strange alliance indeed!