Book #20 of 2024: Walk on Earth a Stranger | DNF: The Wainscott Weasel

Walk on Earth a Stranger (Gold Seer Trilogy, 1) by by Rae Carson.

Quick synopsis: Set in America right before the California gold rush, a young girl with a touch of magic has to pretend to be a boy so she can join a wagon train going west.

Plot: Leah Westfall is a mostly average girl, but she has a touch of magic: She can sense gold. As this story is set in real world America, that bit of magic is a rare thing. Her father trusted the wrong person (his brother), and the brother ended up killing Leah's mother and father to get control of her.

Soon after Leah cuts off her hair, dresses as a boy, and sets off for California as Lee.

Nearly the entire book was Lee, her best friend/sort of love interest Jackson, and a group of families crossing from Georgia to California by wagon train. While I'm no history buff, the story felt very realistic to me.

Writing/editing: Both were good. I spotted no editing errors, and Carson knows how to write a fast-paced story (I read this one so fast I ended up with eye strain).

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: I liked almost all of it. There was a twist at the end that I did not believe at all, but 99.999% of the book worked for me and I enjoyed it.

I did like the story better when the main character was Lee -- women in that time had a hard life, and seeing the main character being treated as a girl was just depressing. That's not the story's fault though, that's just reality.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️. 5 stars, I loved it.

This is the first book in a month that I actually enjoyed and didn't just push myself to finish. The last book I really enjoyed was #9, 11 finished books ago.

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DNF #15: The Wainscott Weasel by Tor Seidler. Ever wish that Bridgerton show would be recast with weasels? The characters are the same, the dialogue is the same, the events are the same, but instead of people it's weasels.

I DNFed this one pretty early on, but already the weasels were holding a cotillion and there were different social classes of weasels. A high class weasel was annoyed a lower class one didn't tip his cap to him...

Just not the book for me. I like my "talking animal" book animals to be realistic animals, not animals standing in for people.