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That America was built on the free labor of its slaves is common knowledge and many have heard the axiom , "Our possessions possess us" as well as "the sins of the fathers are vistited upon the heads of the children." It's hard to determine how many have considered what an institution such as slavery, in which Sarah, Midge, Delphine, and Walter are actual property, does to that "property" and to the owners. It appears both become intimate enemies, owner and slave entwined in an amoral system that although the institution is no longer, created a debt humanity can never repay nor correct.

Valerie Martin explores slavery in all of its demeaning guises in clear, unsentimental prose. Instead of an high contrast polemic, Martin presents a subtle and powerful rendering of the institution from all perspectives: master, slave, revolutionist, abolitionist, burgeoning suffragette, free 'Negroes,' Americans, Southerners, in which the reader comes to understand how pervasive slavery was, and how easily human bondage came to be commonplace, part of the natural order of daily life and God's will and that any deviation from that order was against God's and man's law.

"Property" examines the underbelly of a democracy on the cusp of realizing a liberty for all, not just white males. It is a book that compels the reader to keep reading.