Slaves in this House are educated, and Gavir in particular is a promising scholar, and he is trained to become a teacher. But his abilities also earn him the resentment of the mentally ill younger son of the House, Torm, as well as Torm's toady, the slave Hoby. Meanwhile his beautiful sister Sallo is destined to be a gift-girl -- a slave whose only duty is to provide sex for the masters -- but happily for her she and the heir of the House, Yaven, fall in love, and she will be given to him as a mistress.

Things seem well enough -- Gavir tends to believe, with most of his fellow slaves, that such a social order is the natural way of things. Only slowly does he begin to perceive injustice -- in part because of Torm's unchecked violence, which extends eventually to murder (only lightly punished); and in part because he dimly realizes that in many ways women in this society -- even "free" women -- are enslaved in different ways than men. His life begins to change even more when Etra is besieged -- it seems that the various City States are constantly at war. Then a further tragedy strikes, and Gavir, almost by accident, escapes. From there his path takes him to a couple of colonies of escaped slaves -- who sadly replicate many of the ills of the societies they escaped -- and then eventually to his original home in the Marshes. He must try to understand the nature of his own talent -- but his past as a slave also continues to haunt him.

I loved this book throughout. Gavir is well-depicted and a good person. His life is plausibly portrayed, full of tragedy but also some contentment. Naturally his fascination with scholarship and reading endears him to typical readers. Le Guin nicely uses his visions as foreshadowings of future events in the book, without ever letting them take over the story. She portrays two (or three, if we count the escaped slaves) societies in interesting detail: this has always been a strength of hers (daughter, as she is, of a famous anthropologist). And the book avoids unrealistic clichés: for instance, even the "good" slaveowners are not shown (as we might naïvely hope) coming miraculously to their senses and renouncing their evil ways. There are no easy answers, but there is hope.