Beyond the Dream Catcher

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Synopsis

Chase Rivers, a half-breed Shawnee and a scout for the army, has been tasked by Burning Tree, the medicine man of his tribe, with locating Katherine Hightower, a fellow half-breed who has no knowledge of her heritage, and returning her to her people, because he's seen in a dream that she has powers that make her the only one who can save them. Chase sets out to find her, and along the way, Burning Tree connects them through sexy dreams that he hopes will make her more receptive when she meets Chase. Before he can reach her, Chase is arrested by the army for killing a soldier who beat an elderly Indian woman to death and is on his way to his own hanging when he finally discovers Katherine at a stage stop.

Katherine Hightower has just lost her parents and younger sisters to a fever and is left with only one brother to help her run the stagecoach station her parents used to tend. When Chase arrives in the custody of two soldiers, she thinks she recognizes him from her dreams. He seems to be a rough character, but the soldiers are far worse. Chase saves her from being raped at their hands, but gets shot in the process. Katherine nurses him back to health, and when more soldiers and the Comanche come looking for them, they head out to the open plains with Chase vowing to keep them safe. But before he can return her to the tribe, she's kidnapped by a former friend of her father's who has been stalking her in the hope that she knows the location of a cache of gold from a bank robbery they pulled off years earlier. Chase is the only one who can save her, but when she learns of her heritage, can she accept it?

Review

Beyond the Dream Catcher is a western, historical romance and the first book in Rita Hestand's Dream Catcher series. Nineteen-year-old Katherine Hightower's family has been managing a remote station along the Butterfield stage line in Texas, but as the story opens, her parents and younger twin sisters have only recently succumbed to a fever and died. Unable to support the rest of her siblings, Katherine reluctantly sent her younger brothers back east to live with an aunt, while she and her seventeen-year-old brother, Josh, continue to run the stage stop. Elsewhere, Chase Rivers, a half-breed Shawnee is tasked by Burning Tree, the medicine man of his tribe, with finding Katherine and informing her of her shared heritage as a fellow half-breed. He must also persuade her to return to the tribe, because Burning Tree believes she possesses powers that can save their people. Chase works as a scout for the army, but after killing an officer who beat an elderly Indian woman to death, he's scheduled to hang. He's being transported to his fate, when he meets Katherine at her station and saves her from being raped by the soldiers who were guarding him. Chase is wounded in the fray, but once recovered, he has a hard time convincing Katherine to come with him to Shawnee territory until the Comanche and another group of soldiers end up in a battle right outside her door. Together, they go on a cross-country trek, getting attacked along the way by Indians and soldiers alike, but when Chase risks going out in search of food, Katherine is kidnapped by a former friend of her father's who's been stalking her and thinks she knows the location of a cache of gold from a bank robbery. This leaves Chase in a race against time to save her, but even if he does, he'll still have to contend with the charges against himself, as well as convincing Katherine of her importance to their tribe.

Katherine and Chase are both likable enough characters, but I never really felt like I got much of a sense of who they are and what makes them tick. As I mentioned, Katherine has basically lost most of her family in one way or another, but with the help of her brother, she's determined to try to keep the stage station running as long as she can. By the time Chase shows up, she's already started having dreams about him, supposedly engineered by Burning Tree and the Great Spirit to soften her toward the idea of going with him. Because of this, she's attracted to him and grateful for his rescue from what the soldiers had planned for her, but still she's insistent upon staying put. In fact, several times throughout the story, she seems repetitively determined upon a certain course of action, and then a few chapters later, she does the exact opposite. Sometimes it's due to circumstances outside her control, but other times, she just inexplicably changes her mind. I honestly can't recall a single instance of her making a decision on her own with any kind of solid reasoning behind it, which I found frustrating. Chase wasn't much better for me either. His mother was captured by the Shawnee and after finding herself pregnant decided to stay with them, knowing her son wouldn't be welcomed in the white world, and she's happily married to his father. Chase had a Shawnee fiancee who died although I don't remember it ever being specified as to how. Because he misses his first love, he isn't sure if he can love Katherine, but because Burning Tree tells him he must, he's prepared to possibly marry her before he's even met her. Again, I didn't feel like most of his choices were being actively made by him, but rather were fueled by circumstances or him simply changing his mind. So like I said, Katherine and Chase seemed like nice enough people, but there wasn't a lot of characters development for me to grasp onto to make me genuinely care about them or what happened to them.

In addition to the underdeveloped main characters, there were a number of other things about the story that were either equally underdeveloped, didn't make sense, or simply didn't work for me. It's hard to know where to start, but I guess I'll begin with the plot and the romance, both of which I found lacking. I'll admit that there was a decent amount of action, but overall, it felt like the characters were just going from one thing to the next to the next. In this respect it's a very plot-driven story, because as I mentioned above, the plot points are often what drive the characters. I'm much more of a fan of character-driven novels, so this didn't work well for me. Also what passes for romance is the characters meeting up in the dream world and making love, which pretty much comes from out of left field. The first time it happens, Katherine and Chase barely know each other and only have a passing attraction for one another, but then they get hot and heavy (although not really since these scenes are barely sensual) in their dreams. These dreams are also somehow real??? I can buy into a lot of supernatural occurrences, but since there's little explanation beyond Burning Tree somehow engineering it, this didn't make a lot of sense to me. Not to mention it's a little weird and cringey thinking of an elderly medicine man conjuring up steamy intimacy. Then suddenly later in the story after very little getting-to-know-you moments or even kissing in the real world, etc., they're suddenly in love. I just never felt any of this at all, because there's no build-up and no real emotional connection.

There were also story elements that didn't make much sense, along with what I thought were some glaring continuity errors. First of all, the driving force behind the story is that Katherine has some sort of unrealized powers that are going to save the Shawnee people from an illness that ‘s been claiming lives. There's little to no explanation about how she's going to do this, before Chase goes searching for her. Then once he finds her, they go here, there, and yon with no further mention of it until the very end when she finally goes to the Shawnee camp with him. After spending just a few days with Burning Tree training her, she's suddenly healing people with no explanation as to how she can do it, or why Burning Tree can't, and that's the end of it. Another instance of something not making sense, is that when Katherine is kidnapped by her father's friend, he, at one point, ties her to his horse by a creek so she can get a drink and clean up a bit. I'm thinking, "Girl, why don't you jump on that horse and ride hell for leather to get away from him?" Likewise, later on, he falls asleep, and again, she doesn't try to make a run for it. Ugh! Then there were the continuity errors. After Chase kills the soldiers who were about to attack Katherine, he comes up with a plan to put the bodies back on the stagecoach and make it look like the Comanche did it. But before, he's recovered enough from his own wounds to accomplish this, the Comanche come and steal all their horses. Later, though, the second group of soldiers finds the stagecoach with the bodies. When or how on earth that happened with no horses, I have no idea. Also after the kidnapping, Katherine is riding behind the guy who took her, but when others give chase and start shooting at them, he's the one who gets shot in the shoulder. Again, I don't know how when she would have been the much bigger target. These are just a few of the things that made me roll my eyes at their absurdity.

That brings me to the writing itself, which really needed a lot more polishing. To begin with, the author's style is very dry, more of a bare-bones, "just the facts ma'am" approach that barely skims along the surface. There's way too much telling and not enough showing, which is never a good thing in a romance novel. As I think most romance readers desire, I want to get in there and live and breathe with the characters, to feel what they're feeling and understand what they're thinking, but there's little to no emotion conveyed within this book's pages, which made it all but impossible to immerse myself in the story. Secondly, the dialogue is often very stilted and unnatural, not the way I'd think of people actually talking, and lacks a conversational flow. Some of this was due to a there not being enough contractions, which made their speech too formal for the old west. But another part is that the dialogue often takes a circuitous route, covering ground that's already been gone over before. There's also way too much of it with large swaths of the story being told in nothing but dialogue. The sheer amount of repetition and excessive verbal discourse could have been cut down by a lot to make more room for emoting, introspection, blocking, and environmental descriptions, all of which would have made the story much stronger, IMHO. Lastly, there were a number of grammatically incorrect sentences and other editing errors that should have been caught by a good editor or proofreader.

Normally I'm a fan of western romance, particularly those with Native American characters, so I went into reading Beyond the Dream Catcher thinking that it sounded interesting and fully expecting to enjoy it. However, after finishing it, I'm completely baffled by the phenomenally high average rating of 4.5 stars that it has on both Amazon and GoodReads. It's been quite some time since I've given a book less than three stars, and I rarely do, but I felt like this one simply had too many flaws to even warrant an okay rating. I always try to find the good in a book, but I struggled with that here. The best thing I can say is that for as well as I got to know Katherine and Chase (and even a few of the supporting characters), they at least seemed nice and didn't rub me the wrong way even if their actions didn't always make sense to me. But beyond that, I simply didn't feel particularly engaged with them or their story. I didn't thoroughly dislike the book, but when I'm feeling bored and frustrated as a reader, neither can I really muster any genuine enthusiasm for what I'm reading. For me, this makes Beyond the Dream Catcher an unfortunate lackluster read for me. It looks like Lee, a young soldier who helps Katherine and Chase will become the hero of the next book, and there's a mention in a letter at the end of this book that he's met a woman who I assume will be his heroine. However, after this generally unsatisfying reading experience, it's unlikely that I will continue the series or pick up anything else by the author in the future.

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Themes

Beta Heroes
Spiritual Stories
Tortured Heroines