"Ouma, mother, eat my childhood. Make me beautiful and normal. Make me a woman."

Having fled the tryrannical rule of her father, sixteen-year old Kat now lives among her monther's people -- a society that is joyful and caring, as well as conformist and bound by superstition. Kat has lived her whole life by the sea, but this new world is all stone and sky. It is bare and spare and high, ringed by mountains.

Kat has spend one year dutifully preparing for her initiation rite, a ceremony that involves a live bear. Kat is frightened and uncertain, but only by completing the ritual can she be accepted into the circle of women.

But what of the young blind man she feels herself drawn to, who is handsome and artistic but also belligerent and scornful? And waht of gentle Nall, the man she left behind?