** spoiler alert ** 
 This was a reasonably well-written book that pushes a lot of my happy buttons, and the author has some real raw talent that needs a few years and a good editor to polish up to five-star material, but I do think she (he?) will get there at some point. 
 A big part of my problem with this book was the lack of worldbuilding--and the inconsistency of what little worldbuilding there was. For instance, they had cars and telephones but wore tunics and wrote letters to invite people to dinner. I couldn't reconcile the touches of technology with the touches of medievalism, and the author took no time to explain it or almost anything else that happened outside the four walls in which the protagonist spent most of his time. I also wondered about the book's central conceit, which is that children of poor peasants can be sold into slavery at the age of 15. By the time you're 15, you can leave home and live on your own; why would you permit yourself to be enslaved, especially if there's no love lost for your family? The author did make an attempt to show slavery as an often-good thing for the slave, and maybe this world and its culture is set up to propagate that concept for the to-be-enslaved, but because of said lack of worldbuilding, there was no way to tell and thus the whole thing was very hard to swallow. 
 I also found Bran's initial fear/thought processes overdone and a bit forced to serve the needs of the plot, though the love story the book turned into felt very organic and worked very well. What made less sense for me, though, was why the daughter of Bran's master, who is also the daughter of a slave, would be so eager to have a slave of her own. She's seen the destructive power of slavery--as have Bran's master and mistress--so to choose to propagate a system they know firsthand can be so destructive fell a little flat to me. Some of the language fell flat to me too: the casual cursing in the oddest places, the random and sudden use of "sweetheart" from the master's mouth, and the way that far too many of the characters all shared the exact same voice in dialog. 
 All that being said, I did enjoy the book enough consider reading further into the series. For a short novel, it took a very long time for anything to really happen plot-wise, but once it did it got pretty interesting. The author did a great job of showing a VERY difficult-to-swallow concept--that of the slave genuinely falling in love with his master--though I got the impression, as Bran's master so often said, that he was simply in love with the firs person to be kind to him. It's not quite romance, but it did feel good :)