Sisters of the Chain by Clare Seven 
Story Rating: 1 out of 5 paddles
Sting Factor (kink): 2 out of 5
Review:
Betrayed by her evil sister into a prison cell far from her homeland, Meline Talvallin wakes, naked and in chains. Thus begins a series of events in which she is treated as a slave and publicly punished for a minor crime. When Meline is allowed passage back home, she is determined to confront her evil sibling!
I’m not even sure how to rate this, or what to think of it, as it’s essentially torture porn. I could easily excuse that, but it’s not sexy torture porn. It’s just disturbing.
I don’t judge people’s fantasies, and I have violent fantasies myself, so I suppose it’s hypocritical of me to be critical of the book on the basis of the kinks spotlighted within. And I think it’s not so much what is being done, but that it’s not being presented in a way that comes across as erotic.
The slavery depicted here is brutal and not at all prettied up. The slaves are universally women. Prisoners are kept absolutely filthy, treated completely unfairly, and tormented constantly. Fairly realistic in terms of the inhumanity of slavery, in other words – although the wounds and punishments described would, in real life, be far more disabling than they are shown to be, not to mention infection, disease, and so on. Perhaps, for some, that qualifies as erotic, but it didn’t for me.
I will refrain from describing the tortures inflicted on secondary characters, but it’s pretty disturbing.
