Review: I Want To Die In My Boots On by Natalie Appleton

Synopsis: I Want to Die in My Boots is the untold story of Belle Jane, the woman who ran one of Canada’s largest cattle thieving rings in the 1920s, who brilliantly broke every taboo, took the names of five different husbands, and nearly followed the tragic end of her great hero, the outlaw queen Belle Starr.

Dark and daring, meticulously researched and mostly true, I Want to Die in My Boots is a lyrical, unconventional literary novel that gives voice to the unheard in a long-forgotten world. After leaving Montana for a third husband and the ranch she’d always wanted, Belle settles in Saskatchewan, before spending her final years in Penticton, reading tarot cards for strangers.

Written a century after her arrest, this fictional tribute to Belle Jane, an unsung hero in Canada’s west, is inventive yet thoughtful, a work of Prairie literary fiction that takes an edgy twist to history.

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OK ... to start with, I had no idea who Belle Jane was, hence my interest. This for me, was not an area of history or geographical area that had been on my reading radar - so I was interested and intrigued by this woman.

Rustling cattle used to be a “hanging offence,” at least in the eyes of locals. Although the connection between the legal definition of rustling and hanging never really existed, many “rustlers” met their end on a rope on makeshift gallows at the hands of vigilantes.

Quite frankly, with the lack of anything appearing in a google search, I could not begin to discern if this fictional account was anywhere near close to the real history of Belle Jane.  And after reading, I came away none the wiser. The end felt decidedly rushed using a dual timeline narrative to clarify the fate of Belle Jane.

This one was not really for me.