Name: Dark Heart
ISBN: 9780689850707

Betsy James

Seventeen-year-old Kat's struggle to learn the ways of her dead mother's people in the hill country is complicated by her failure in the bear ceremony, a spiritual rite of passage, and her attraction to the blind outcast Raim. By the author of Long Night Dance. Reprint.

Dark Heart

Aleena Korell

"Everything comes out of the dark."
Wind cracked the hems of Kat's culottes.
"Everything returns to the dark," said Raím. "Sooner or later."

OMG. RAÍM.
I had no idea this series was set in the same world as Roadsouls, but when Raím appeared on the page, it was an absolute gift. Blind Raím is damaged, outcast, surly, proud-- and loveable, dangit. And when they meet, he and Kat find they are something of the same.

"This world's small, it's dark," he said. "I don't want to weave the same cloth forever. This whole pattern-- if I could let it go!" 
"You couldn't live without patterns. It would be like having no bones."
"I just want to change them. There must be a place where you can change them. The place all patterns came from, before the world was made."

If Long Night Dance was about Kat learning how to be on her own-- to break out of the box of society and oppression and allow herself to be free-- Dark Heart is about Kat allowing herself to stay out of that box. She goes to live with her mother's people, as different from her upbringing as anything, and immediately feels pressure to be who they say she should be. She's tried to live like her father, now she wonders if she's more like her mother.

She discovers that she's like herself. 
She discovers she doesn't have to follow the patterns that are set before her. She can change them. She can choose new ones.

"Creek's like that. The pattern's set up before you're born, and there's nothing left to do but beat it into place."

I think if I had read this before reading Roadsouls, I may have been a bit disappointed with the ending and where it's leading. But I know how Raím's story ends and it's perfect. Now I hope Kat gets her perfect ending in Listening at the Gate. (It's Betsy James, I won't be disappointed.)

Dark Heart

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