Decent YA which deals a little (a lot?) naively with slavery, imperialism, and colonialism, but which does set out with the intention to deal with them. Reminds me a little of M.M. Kaye's books on those themes, although not dealing with a real culture.

Kestrel (One of the 19 approved YA protagonist names) is the daughter of the general that conquered the land they live in. She shares his skill with tactics, but not his like of battle, or his skill at hand-to-hand. Then she buys a slave because something about him catches her attention, and ...

Okay, listen.

I think this book deal... not terribly? with the slave/owner relationship, working under the constraints it's working under. But setting up Kestrel as the 'good slave-owner' made me hella uncomfortable. The book acknowledges that slavery is an evil, but wants Kestrel to be innocent of it: she freed her old nurse and maintains her on a cottage on the grounds, but cannot free any other slaves because they all belong to her father.

I'm almost more uncomfortable with her "innocence" than I would be with a deeper complicity, I think.

This dynamic abruptly ceases to be the case about half-way through the book, for spoiler reasons.