Not long after I started this book, I was delighted to discover that In Walk on Earth a Stranger, the protagonist is a girl named Leah Westfall who has to take on the guise of a boy, becoming Lee McCauley in order to strike it out on her own cross-country.
If this book lives up to even just a fraction of those descriptions, it was going to be awesome.īut the best has yet to come. I’m not ashamed to admit that I still dig it up to play every few years, just to relive the nostalgia. The Oregon Trail? THE OREGON TRAIL?!! I loved that game growing up. Then came several of my Goodreads friends’ reviews comparing it to The Oregon Trail. I have a huge weakness for fantasy western settings and themes exploring wild frontiers, so a story set in Gold Rush-era America about a young woman trying to make her way to California sounded exactly like something I would enjoy.Īhem. All opinions are my own.įrom the very start, I had a feeling that Walk on Earth a Stranger would be just the book for me. An author’s note describes some wording choices and a bit of personal context.A review copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. While the approach to historical fact is freewheeling, fantasy readers will likely find Leah and her gold-sensing core to be intriguingly different than the usual heroine. If Leah’s reveal as a girl after pretending to be a young man most of the trip is accepted a bit too readily, it can be forgiven as a result of Leah just being so darn useful to people. For the most part, Carson does nice work adding nuance to her side characters, showing minor evolutions that challenge the racism, sexism, and classism deeply rooted in most of the people Leah encounters. News of the gold rush is just making its way east, and when Leah gets word, she leaves her Georgia home and heads west, joining a scrappy group of travelers and hoping to catch up with her crush, a half-Cherokee boy who left a few days earlier.
After her parents are murdered and the gold stolen, Leah escapes from her only remaining relative, a sinister uncle, and determines to make her own life, ignoring assumptions about women’s limited abilities as she always has. Leah can sense the presence of gold, easily finding it in the ground, and her family is hiding a sturdy amount until they can find a way to sell it discreetly. Carson, best known for her fantasy, dips into the Old West here but brings a bit of supernatural ability to the mix.
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