The Rush by Beth Lewis

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I loved this! I’ve never read anything by Beth Lewis before, or even come across her, but this is one of my favourite books of the year so far. It’s set in Canada during the Gold Rush and follows the stories of three very different women whose paths cross in Dawson City in the Klondike.

The Rush begins with the arrival of Kate Kelly in Skaguay (now Skagway), Alaska, in 1898. Kate is there to meet up with the guide who is going to take her along the White Pass Trail, the route to Yukon and the Klondike goldfields. She needs to get there as quickly as possible because she has received a desperate plea for help from her sister, Charlotte, in Dawson City: This may be my last letter. He has finally found me and there is nowhere left to run.

In the little Klondike settlement of Boulder Creek, Ellen Rhodes spends her days alone in her cabin, cooking, cleaning and washing, while her husband, Charlie, goes down to the river and digs for gold that never appears. Ellen is sure they’re wasting their time and money, but Charlie refuses to give up on his dream. Finally, we meet Martha, owner of the Dawson Hotel, which doubles as the town’s brothel. Martha is fiercely proud of the business she has built up and is determined to keep it out of the hands of the ruthless Bill Mathers, who seems to be buying up the entire town.

The three women take turns to narrate the story, with the viewpoints rotating throughout the book. They are leading very separate lives at first, but are drawn together when one of Martha’s girls is found murdered. They’re also connected by a mysterious fortune teller who encounters all three of them and seems to have an uncanny ability to truly predict the future. There’s a mystery element to the novel as the women try to find out who the murder victim really is, who has killed her and why, but although this was intriguing and cleverly plotted, what I really loved was the setting and learning what it was like to be a woman in that fascinating but harsh environment where there were any number of natural and man-made disasters – an avalanche, a fire, an outbreak of typhoid – that could change everything in an instant.

I seem to read very few historical novels set in Canada, so I was pleased to have come across one with such a strong sense of place. The vivid descriptions made it easy for me to imagine the cabin by the river where Ellen and Charlie’s marriage falls apart, a victim to the obsessive fever that grabs hold of some human beings when gold is mentioned, and the streets of Dawson City where enterprising men and women like Martha have discovered that the real fortune is to be made not from mining but from the miners. But I particularly enjoyed following Kate’s journey from Alaska into Canada’s Yukon territory, a journey which includes a dramatic, exhilarating adventure crossing the dangerous White Horse Rapids.

I had assumed that the characters were entirely fictional, so I was surprised to read the author’s note at the end of the book and discover that many of them, including Kate, Ellen and Martha, are actually based loosely on real historical figures. This really is a fascinating book, in so many different ways, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Thanks to Viper for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 5/20 for 20 Books of Summer 2025.

My Commonplace Book: June 2025

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A selection of quotes and pictures to represent June’s reading:

commonplace book
noun
a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.

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He’d be better off reading detective stories than going to Miss Covey’s English Grammar class. After all, there are worse places to find an education than crime fiction.

A Schooling in Murder by Andrew Taylor (2025)

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“Yes, I learned to hate, Peter, and that is worse than being sick, or starved, or thirsty, or in pain.”

Jennie by Paul Gallico (1950)

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Hand-coloured photo of Dawson City c. 1899 at the end of the gold rush (University Library Washington)

I was a child of the outdoors, a wild thing, made more of mud and scrapes than manners and poise. My father did not try to change that. He knew, because he was the same, that trying to make me something I was not would be like trying to alter the flow of a river by standing in the water and shouting.

The Rush by Beth Lewis (2025)

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“The amount of time you spent together probably matters, but less time doesn’t mean less love. Whether it’s a day or year, human or cat, and even if we may never see them again, there are those who are irreplaceable in our lives.”

We’ll Prescribe you a Cat by Syou Ishida (2023)

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If you feel that you have been humiliated, you have got to learn to dare to yell and scream that you feel that way. Women have become paralysed. It’s the culture. It’s the culture that has made us all lose the courage to be ourselves when we are hurt – to really yell and scream.

The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood (1976)

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‘The world?‘ Cassandra gave a small laugh, as if at the follies of youth. ‘I regret to inform you that the world does not think of any of us as much as we all like to think.’ It was at least true that at her own time of life, it did not give a jot. ‘As for the minuscule circles in which we both live…It may be true that you have created a minor diversion. But for what do we live but to create sport for our neighbours?’

The Elopement by Gill Hornby (2025)

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Olimpia Maidalchini, Contemporary portrait by Diego Velázquez

He knows very well that this is what it is to be an artist. Success is built upon the backs of many failures. You must turn the page; you must try again.

These Wicked Devices by Matthew Plampin (2025)

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“Do you think a murderer ought to be a happy man?”

Miss Marple coughed. “Well, they usually have been in my experience.”

“I don’t suppose your experience has gone very far,” said Mr Rafiel.

In this assumption, as Miss Marple could have told him, he was wrong. But she forebore to contest his statement. Gentlemen, she knew, did not like to be put right in their facts.

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie (1964)

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His living room, about eight tatami mats in size, was littered with books, as usual. While many were architecture-related, the vast majority were mystery novels. More than seemed reasonable, actually.

AUTHOR: So many books. As always.

KURIHARA: That does seem to be where most of my money goes.

Strange Houses by Uketsu (2021)

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Maggie Dickson’s pub, Edinburgh

It is a world of confidence, even amongst those who lack the good looks or wisdom or godliness to have earned it. It is not a world I am comfortable in, but I have had to find a way through. Theirs is a black-and-white world of certainties: of good and bad, and right and wrong. To them, I am wicked. So they strung me up in front of a baying crowd. But none of them had ever been in my shoes.

The Mourning Necklace by Kate Foster (2025)

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‘But I think that everyone should do all the things they shouldn’t do – and then, they won’t.’

Dr. Parry laughed as he rose reluctantly from the old creaking basket-chair. ‘It takes a doctor to disentangle that,’ he said. ‘But I imagine you refer to moral inoculation.’

‘Yes,’ nodded Helen. ‘Like being vaccinated against small-pox.’

The Spiral Staircase by Ethel Lina White (1933)

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His words were meant to chill me, and they did. But I wouldn’t tell him what ghosts there were waiting in the night for me, sometimes even in the day. ‘Which of us isn’t haunted by our past?’ I said, at last. ‘We each have one, after all. You can’t live and not have a past.’

Love and Other Poisons by Lesley McDowell (2025)

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Favourite books read in June:

The Rush, The Mourning Necklace and The Spiral Staircase

Authors read for the first time this month:

Beth Lewis, Syou Ishida, Caroline Blackwood

Places visited in my June reading:

England, Scotland, Wales, USA, Japan, Canada, Italy, a fictional Caribbean island

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Reading notes: June was another good month of reading for me, helped by having a week off work at the beginning of the month, and my 20 Books of Summer also got off to a great start. I’ve read nine books from my list so far, which gives me hope that I’ll be able to complete the challenge this year! I’m also pleased that I was able to contribute two cat-related posts to Mallika’s Reading the Meow event.

In July, I will be continuing with 20 Books of Summer and I have a book lined up for the Read Christie 2025 challenge as well. I’m also hoping I can catch up with posting my outstanding reviews!

What did you read in June? Do you have any plans for July?

The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis

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A lot of novels have been published recently dealing with the subject of witchcraft and witch trials, but The Hounding – Xenobe Purvis’ debut – is something different. Set in 18th century Oxfordshire, after the fervour for witch hunting has largely died down, it explores the dangers of being different in a small community where superstition is rife.

The five Mansfield sisters, who live with their blind grandfather on his farm, have become the subject of gossip in the village of Little Nettlebed. Their grandmother has recently died and the sisters are in mourning, but it seems that people have little sympathy for them. The Mansfields have always been seen as odd by the other villagers and since their grandmother’s death, a rumour has begun to spread that the girls have the power to turn themselves into dogs.

It’s Pete Darling, the drunken, misogynistic ferryman who starts the rumour after one of the girls refuses to speak to him, causing him to feel disrespected. As a summer heatwave descends on the village and the river begins to dry up, Pete’s trade is affected, giving him less to occupy his days and more time to drink. When he sees what he believes are the Mansfield sisters undergoing a strange transformation, it’s not quite clear what has actually happened. Has Pete had some kind of hallucination brought on by heat and alcohol? Is his own dislike of the girls causing him to see what he wants to see and conveniently giving him a way to punish them? Or are the sisters really turning into dogs in front of his eyes? Sadly, the girls are not popular in the village and other people are easily convinced that Pete’s story is true.

From calm, serious Anne, the eldest, down to little Mary, a solemn six-year-old – and in between pretty Elizabeth, shy, timid Grace and tomboyish Hester – the girls share a close bond and keep themselves to themselves, which leads to them being viewed as arrogant and unwelcoming. To Farmer Mansfield, however, they are his beloved granddaughters and he just wants them to be happy and safe. Other characters in the book also have their own views of the girls and these include newcomer Thomas Mildmay, who has been hired to help with the haymaking on the farm; the innkeeper’s wife, Temperance Shirly; and two local boys, Robin and Richard Wildgoose. The perspective we never really get is that of the sisters themselves, but seeing them through the eyes of others helps us to build up a picture of who the sisters really are and what they are like.

I found this a very atmospheric book; Purvis successfully creates a tense, almost claustrophobic feel through her descriptions of the relentless hot, dry weather and the small-mindedness of the villagers. A mixture of superstition, prejudice and fear of things they don’t understand makes the people of Little Nettlebed ready to think the worst of the Mansfield sisters and the girls don’t really do much to dispel these misconceptions because they do behave increasingly oddly when other people are around – almost as if becoming a dog is a safer option than being seen as different. I really enjoyed this fascinating and unusual novel!

Thanks to Hutchinson Heinemann for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie

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This month for the Read Christie 2025 challenge, the theme is ‘amateurs’ and although I’ve read the suggested title, Crooked House, quite recently, there were some alternatives that I haven’t already read – including this one, A Caribbean Mystery. Published in 1964, it’s one of the later entries in the Miss Marple series and not one that had really appealed to me; Miss Marple belongs in St Mary Mead and it seemed incongruous to put her in a Caribbean setting! Now that I’ve read it, though, I can say that although it’s maybe not one of my absolute favourite Christie novels, I did really enjoy it.

You may be wondering why Miss Marple is in the Caribbean. Well, it seems she has been ill and her nephew Raymond has paid for her to spend some time recuperating in the sun on the island of St Honoré. Miss Marple is grateful, of course, and is enjoying the warmth and the scenery, but she’s also beginning to feel bored – every day is the same as the one before and nothing ever really seems to happen! This all changes when she falls into conversation with Major Palgrave, an elderly man staying at her hotel, who tells her a story about a man who got away with murder several times. He asks her if she wants to see a picture of a murderer but as he begins to dig out the snapshot, he suddenly stops abruptly and changes the subject as other people approach.

The next day, Major Palgrave is found dead in his room. High blood pressure is blamed, but Miss Marple is convinced he’s been murdered and that there’s some connection with the photo he was about to show her. To add to her suspicions, the photo now seems to have disappeared from the Major’s belongings. It seems likely that the murderer is one of the other guests, but which one? The most likely suspects seem to be the Dysons, Greg and Lucky, and their friends Edward and Evelyn Hillingdon, two nature loving couples who often travel together and who had been walking up the beach towards Major Palgrave as he told Miss Marple his story. But there are others who can’t be ruled out, including the Kendals, who own the hotel; Canon Prescott and his sister; and Mr Rafiel, an old man confined to a wheelchair, visiting the island with his masseur and his secretary.

I found this a very enjoyable mystery; it’s not one of Christie’s more complex plots but there’s some clever misdirection to send the reader along the wrong track. The first murder takes place early in the novel and the story continues to unfold at a steady pace after that, so it held my interest from beginning to end. Miss Marple also plays a big role, in contrast to some of the other books where we see very little of her. This time, she’s present for the entire novel, interacting with the suspects and victims and sharing her thoughts and deductions with the people she believes she can trust. As usual, people underestimate Miss Marple, dismissing her as a ‘fluffy old lady’, but in time some of them come to see that there’s far more to her than meets the eye!

Some of the characters in this book reappear or are referred to again in the later novel Nemesis, published in 1971. I read that one a few years ago, so it was nice to see how those characters were originally introduced and how Miss Marple gained her nickname ‘Nemesis’. I should probably have read the two books in the correct order as it also meant that I could quickly discount those two recurring characters as serious suspects, but it didn’t really matter. Now I’m looking forward to reading Christie’s memoir Come, Tell Me How You Live for Read Christie in July!

Book 4/20 for 20 Books of Summer 2025.

Top Ten Tuesday: Most anticipated books releasing in the second half of 2025

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is “Most Anticipated Books Releasing in the Second Half of 2025”.

These are not technically my ‘most anticipated’ books, as I already listed some of those in my recent Historical Musings post just a few weeks ago. However, I only included historical fiction in that post. The ten books listed below are some more books I’m hoping to read and are from a range of genres.

1. The Killer Question by Janice Hallett – I’ve enjoyed all of Janice Hallett’s books, although I know her unusual style isn’t for everyone. This new one sounds great!

2. Rainforest by Michelle Paver – I was unaware that Michelle Paver had a new book coming out until I saw this one on NetGalley. I enjoyed her last one, Wakenhyrst.

3. The Shapeshifter’s Daughter by Sally Magnusson – I’ve read all of Magnusson’s previous adult novels but this one, based on the Norse myth of Hel of the underworld, sounds completely different.

4. The Token by Sharon Bolton – I don’t read a lot of contemporary crime but a new Sharon Bolton book is always something I look forward to!

5. Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife by Martin Edwards – I’m hoping this murder mystery will be as entertaining as it sounds.

6. No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes – Yes, it’s another Greek retelling, but Natalie Haynes is an author I’ve particularly enjoyed in the past, so I’m sure this reimagining of the Jason and Medea story will be a good one!

7. The Clock House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji – I loved one of this author’s books (The Labyrinth House Murders) and disliked another (The Decagon House Murders) so I’m curious to see what this one will be like!

8. Queens at War by Alison Weir – I haven’t read all of the earlier books in Weir’s non-fiction series about medieval queens of England, but this one covers some of my favourite periods – the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses.

9. Murder at the Black Cat Cafe by Seishi Yokomizo – The latest book in the Kosuke Kindaichi series to be translated into English. I’ve enjoyed all of the others but this one sounds a bit different.

10. The Twelve Days of Christmas by Susan Stokes-Chapman – I’ve only read a short story by Stokes-Chapman but would like to try one of her novels.

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Are you interested in any of these? Which other books being published in the second half of the year are you planning to read?

A Schooling in Murder by Andrew Taylor

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I love Andrew Taylor’s books and over the last few years I’ve been enjoying his Marwood and Lovett series, set in the 17th century in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London. His new novel, A Schooling in Murder, is not part of the series and leaves that setting behind entirely, taking us instead to the 1940s and a girls’ school near the border of England and Wales.

The novel has a very unusual narrator and when I sat down to write this review I wondered if it would be possible to avoid giving away too much about her. However, the publisher’s own blurb reveals her secret, as do most of the other reviews I’ve seen (and to be fair, she tells us herself in the first chapter anyway): Annabel Warnock is a ghost. In life, she was a teacher at Monkshill Park School for Girls, until being pushed into the river from the Maiden’s Leap, a clifftop viewing point on the Gothick Walk, part of the school grounds. Who pushed her? Annabel doesn’t know, but she’s determined to find out.

As a ghost, Annabel is able to move freely around Monkshill Park – although places she never visited while alive are inaccessible to her – but she can’t be seen or heard by anyone else. This naturally makes investigating her murder very difficult, especially as her colleagues don’t even know she’s dead since her body was never washed up. It seems that the only person who can help is Alec Shaw, Annabel’s replacement – referred to simply as a ‘Visiting Tutor’ to appease parents worried about the school employing a man to teach their girls. Although she can’t speak directly to Alec, Annabel finds a very imaginative way to communicate with him, which was one of my favourite aspects of the book!

As well as the mystery element of the book, we also learn a lot about life in a 1940s girls’ boarding school. Andrew Taylor does a good job of portraying the rivalries and complex relationships that form when groups of teenage girls – and groups of teachers – are living together in a close-knit community. There are occasional references to the war, which is in its closing stages as the book begins in May 1945, but Monkshill Park feels largely sheltered from the outside world, so although the war touches the lives of the characters in various ways it doesn’t form a big part of the story.

The descriptions of the school and its landscape are very detailed, so I was interested to read in Taylor’s author’s note that he based it on Piercefield, a now ruined house and estate near Chepstow in Wales, and that in its fictional guise of Monkshill Park it also formed the setting for his earlier novel, The American Boy. I should have remembered that as The American Boy is my favourite of all the Andrew Taylor books I’ve read!

Although it was interesting to watch a victim trying to solve their own murder, I felt that there was a distance between the characters and the reader, which I suppose is inevitable when your narrator can only watch and observe rather than interact directly with the people around her. Maybe because we’re only seeing them from Annabel’s unique perspective, most of the characters also seem particularly unpleasant! Possibly for these reasons, I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as some of Taylor’s other books, but it was imaginative and different and I’m looking forward to whatever he writes next.

Thanks to Hemlock Press for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 3/20 for 20 Books of Summer 2025.

Before Dorothy by Hazel Gaynor

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I’m sure most of us have seen The Wizard of Oz (and/or read L. Frank Baum’s classic novel on which it’s based), but how many of us have stopped to think about what happened to the characters before the story began? Why was Dorothy living with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry? Who were her real parents? And how did the family come to be in Kansas in the first place? In Hazel Gaynor’s new novel, Before Dorothy, she sets out to answer these questions and more.

The book is written from the perspective of Emily Gale – Aunt Em – and begins in 1932 as she returns to Chicago following the death of her sister, Annie. Annie’s seven-year-old daughter, Dorothy, has been left an orphan and Emily and her husband, Henry, are to become her legal guardians. Emily hasn’t seen Dorothy since she was a baby – she and Henry now live in Kansas and her relationship with Annie has been very strained in recent years – and she’s not at all sure she’s the right person to care for a child, particularly one who has suffered the trauma of losing her parents. Once back in Kansas, however, Emily gradually begins to feel a stronger bond with Dorothy than she’d expected.

Moving backwards and forwards in time, we watch as Emily and Annie, originally from Connemara in Ireland, first arrive in Chicago in 1924 and meet their respective husbands, cousins Henry and John Gale. We also see how Emily makes the decision to start a new life with Henry in Kansas and what she discovers when she gets there. The focus is always on Emily rather than Dorothy and unlike the Baum novel and its adaptations, the story is firmly grounded in reality rather than fantasy.

I tend not to read many books that are spin-offs of classics or that borrow other authors’ characters and I only chose to read this one because I’ve enjoyed some of Hazel Gaynor’s previous work. I wasn’t sure I would like it, but I did – although I think it would probably have worked just as well if it had simply been a novel about an original fictional family living on the prairie, with no connection to the Gales. It was fun spotting the references to The Wizard of Oz, though. The scarecrow, tin man and lion all appear, as do the wizard, witches (good and wicked), the tornado and many more – although not necessarily in the form you would expect! Gaynor manages to work these references into the story in a way that feels believable and not too forced.

What I liked best about this book, though, was the portrayal of life on the prairie – the sense of adventure and optimism Emily and Henry feel when they first arrive, followed by a growing awareness that things are going to be much more difficult than they’d expected. With an influx of people coming to the Great Plains in large numbers to farm the land, there’s eventually a surplus of wheat, too much to be sold, leading to a drop in prices. Worse, the overexploitation of the land and removal of the prairie grasses, combined with a prolonged drought, causes severe dust storms (known as the Dust Bowl). The hardships and challenges faced by the Gales, as well as the environmental disaster unfolding around them, forms a big part of the novel.

I’m sure a lot of the people who read this book will have been drawn to it by the links with The Wizard of Oz, but even if that doesn’t appeal to you I think there’s still enough here to make it an enjoyable work of historical fiction in its own right.

Thanks to HarperCollins for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.