Property

Valerie Martin · b. 1948 · United States

Why it matters

A Louisiana plantation wife narrates her brutal marriage and her own possessive claim on Sarah, the enslaved woman given to her as a wedding gift. A short, claustrophobic first-person account that makes its narrator's moral blindness the entire indictment.

At a glance

A compact length hides real moral density in its narrator's self-serving, unreliable account.