Walk on Earth a Stranger

I really enjoyed this book. I felt like the characters were really well fleshed out and I felt like I really knew who they were and what motivated them. This book is definitely a journey, it follows Lee (Leah) as she travels to California during the Gold Rush. You could really tell Rae Carson took the time to thoughtfully research all aspects of the journey and made it realistic.

This book has very little romance which I also appreciated. It was a focus on female empowerment and Leah taking charge in her life and not letting any man make decisions for her.

I liked Walk on Earth a Stranger very much, with one notable exception: the lazy, useless, no-good burden of a reverend. That trope was thin and tired seventy years ago, and I'm taking off a full star for it. I expected better from the author of the Girl of Fire and Thorns series, which explored the complexities of faith and belief in a beautiful, authentic way.

Still, there was much about Walk on Earth a Stranger to love. The main character yearned for freedom, and deeply enjoyed her taste of it while posing as a boy, but she didn't gleefully throw off all trappings of the feminine. Putting back on a skirt, she said, felt like being in her own skin again. She didn't want to abandon being a woman–she wanted freedom as a woman.

There were a wide variety of other well-developed female characters, with complex relationships and motivations. And Jefferson was wonderful.

This book reminded me, too, of why I loved the Western genre so much as a kid: the danger, maybe, the thrill and drama, but mostly the possibility. The wide-open sky. The idea that anything could be around the next bend or over the next ridge. Adding a touch of magic just makes it better.