Betsy James

After seventeen-year-old Kat leaves the Creek home of her mother's sister, she returns to Downshore and becomes embroiled in upheaval there and in the land of the Rigi, as well as in Nall's quest to go to the Gate.

Listening at the Gate

Aleena Korell

So what do you do when you can't bear the world to be the world? When it devours brothers like a shark, twists babies, gives wealth and power to evil men? Do you go to where it is being born-- if you can find that place-- and see whether there, perhaps, it makes sense? Or maybe you just go searching for that place, because if you are moving, the pain is less?

I'm still sorting through words to talk about this book, and this series as a whole now that I've finished it. This, actually, is a theme throughout Listening at the Gate: not having the exact words to say what you mean, but using the words you have. 

Betsy James is the queen of motifs-- there are quite a few woven through the narrative that converge in the end and bring a beautiful, heartbreaking epiphany to both the characters and the reader. In Roadsouls, it's names. In Long Night Dance it is the sea. In Dark Heart it is weaving, the rigidity of patterns.

In Listening at the Gate there are several that stand out: songs, "halves" (the term used to mean all the different facets of a person), and "Nothing". Nothing means something very significant throughout this story but only under the weight of context (aka spoilers)-- and it sort of blew my mind when James tied off the loop at the end.

One thing that I loved about this book is that James puts her characters through the absolute wringer. I felt their deep pain, deep loss and deep Nothing due to the loss of identity. These are Young Adult books but they deal with very profound matters in a sort of intuitive way. They're about growing up-- each book is a stage of maturity. A lesson to learn. And Listening at the Gate is the most painful lesson of all.

Kat learns to break out of oppression and to be her own person in the previous books. She is now ready to return to her love, Nall. But there are terrible things happening in her hometown, and, Nall fears, in Nall's own home across the sea. And Nall has his own journey of identity to embark on.

Having a calling, knowing it all your life, embracing it and pursuing it only to have it fall utterly short of your expectation.... that is Nall's journey. And he is changed because of it. It's not stated in the text, but I felt it because I've felt it before-- all the signs of depression are there. Floundering, uncertainty. No direction. He must learn to embrace his new calling.

I saw his face and thought, Until now you've always known who you were and were not. Are you really nothing? Or are you just finding out that you have a thousand halves, like me?

Kat's journey, then, is to learn to love this person she doesn't recognize. And that is so, so hard.

For there was, after all, a ghost in the wind, of a lonely girl who had longed so deeply that she had called a man out of the sea; yet she had not gotten what she wanted. There had been some mistake. She had longed for a lover like the one who had kissed her on Mailin's hearth, and this was not he.

This series as a whole reminds me very much of the Nevermor series by Lani Lenore-- the journey of maturity the characters take, and the pain, are very similar.

Loving is hard. This series shows that unapologetically, for which I'm grateful. But it's worth it.

"Aieh said, 'One loves fools.' But there's nobody else to love, as far as I can tell."

Listening at the Gate

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