Review: I Want to Die in my Boots by Natalie Appleton

I Want to Die in My Boots by Natalie Appleton

Victoria: Touchwood Editions, 2025

What a fantastic novel that tells the story of a woman a century ago who had been largely lost to history until now. This is Appleton's fictional reimagining of the life of Belle Jane Corneil, and I was pleased to review it for The British Columbia Review. This article was originally published on the BC Review on August 7, 2025. 

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Imagining the lives of women a century ago as they worked and tended the lands of the North American prairie can feel elusive because of the male-centred narratives that dominate. It must have felt like uncovering a nugget of gold when Vernon-based writer Natalie Appleton discovered a brief mention of “Mrs. B.J. Dale” in a local publication during her research on homesteaders in Ravenscrag, Saskatchewan.

The B.J. stands for Belle Jane, a real-life American-Canadian woman who led an outfit of cattle thieves in Saskatchewan, but who left relatively few clues as to her story. She’s the engaging subject of Appleton’s debut novel I Want to Die in my Boots. The research was challenging, writes Appleton in the Introduction: “I began hunting up clues about her storied life. I wondered, how does a woman come to lead a gang of cattle thieves in the 1920s? Oh, but she was elusive…I had to work for it.” Appleton started with facts about the real Belle Jane’s life garnered from archives and newspaper clippings, then crafted this engaging tale of a woman who ends up at the edge of the prairie—and on the wrong side of the law.

The novel begins in 1879 with the birth of Belinda Jane Corneil, the first of her many names. Later, in Montana, the family raises draft horses and Belinda Jane’s father also owns a tavern. At age eleven, she sits at her father’s office desk, relishing the thought of being the boss. It appeals to her, that side of the desk. “This side, it felt like winning a footrace or giving the recitation at school: everyone saw you brighter, smarter.”

Author Natalie Appleton

This is when she sees a newspaper article about the “Queen of Outlaws,” the “Dashing Mustang Rider, Crack Shot, Fearless and Revengeful” Belle Starr, who had several husbands, lived a bandit life, and “Died as She Had Lived,” which is “four bullets in her back, shot off her mare.” Belinda Jane dubs herself “Belle Jane” from that day forward, beginning a story that showcases the perpetual tug–of-war between the reality of life for a woman in this era and Belle Jane’s desire to forge a new and unique path of unconventional, bold living.

The poetically written novel offers a character full of contradictions. What makes the reading fun is that it’s not only the reader who can see Belle Jane’s contradictions, it’s Belle Jane herself. She’s a woman self-aware, for the most part, and simply cannot help herself from making wonderfully bad choices at times. Despite her intellectual better judgment, she’s drawn to inconstant men by the promise of passion and the hope of a shared vision. Each husband is a lout in his own way, but Belle Jane puts her head down and carries on.

Natalie Appleton

Belle Jane’s persistent self-determination is beautiful to read. In the early twentieth century on the prairie, life was often difficult, and many women had limited choices. For years, the idea of Belle Starr hides in her subconscious as she takes work in Butte as a stenographer, encounters an excruciating loss, and sinks to a low point in her first marriage to Peter Junk.

At twenty-five, she was “married to a man on the sauce, she slept too late in a dank two-roomed apartment, just hoping for card party invitations.” She then remembers her teenage heroine: “For the first time in years, Belle Jane thought about Belle Starr. Belle Jane saw flashes of imaginings of her younger self as the bandit, riding high, pistol at her hips, just daring you. What had happened?”

Separated from Peter, she leaves Montana: “She’d said to heck with Montana. Montana was what was wrong with her life.” In Spokane, life is perilous and there are so many ways to fail. Death stalks friends and family at every turn; the book is full of it. People die of disease, of accidents, of violence. Children die, women miscarry. Belle Jane is hyper-aware that she could end up as destitute “as the dirty, toothless streetwalker” she’d just encountered while looking for work. Perhaps worst to Belle Jane? A life of mundanity.

After another failed marriage and a transition to motherhood, she decides (against her better judgement!) to marry her third, younger husband Bill Kinnick and reinvent herself once again. In a book rife with pivotal decisions, this is a significant one: Belle Jane finds out that her husband is a horse and cattle rustler, and she becomes a key player in the operation. Mysterious nighttime escapades, wielding hot irons to falsify brands, making deals: all appeal to her. She’s realizing the persona of her alter ego Belle Starr.

Appleton’s prose has a flowing quality, one that works best if you let its currents wash over you, particularly when Belle Jane is observing, thinking and engaging in self-talk. Her thoughts meander, reflected in short sentences, fragments and words that occasionally slip across the page. This style showcases Belle Jane’s personality and develops impressive depth of character.

Rather than offering an action-packed story of thieving, the novel paints a picture of daily life on the prairie in the early 1900s. Belle Jane’s sharp eye for detail, along with her rueful self-knowledge gives the book an almost joyful irreverence at times. Engaging details bring scenes to life, like when Belle Jane starts a school out of her home in Maple Creek, Saskatchewan—

She would cup the child’s face with her hand, lean down (had she ever felt so tall, so much a witch?) and peck the child’s cheek. She tried not to mind the perfume of farm children: wisps of blood in cracked lips, rotting slags of beef in their baby teeth, scabs of dung at their elbows.

Belle Jane’s persona of teacher to the little ones is in harsh contrast to her clandestine activities as she works with her husband and the other men. Livestock thieving is done largely off the page, and shady deals are brokered in hushed conversation.

A reckoning comes as the law catches up to Belle Jane. Appleton has included actual court records, a great way to connect the author’s Belle Jane and the historical Mrs. B.J. Dale of the Introduction. Belle Jane, like her hero Belle Star on the back of a horse who “Died As She Had Lived,” holds her head up high as she’s carted off in the back of a police car.

Readers who enjoy enigmatic and whimsical characters will find much to like in this historical fiction account of a woman who pushed against the conventional narratives about women in the early twentieth century on the North American prairie. I Want to Die in My Boots is a vibrant tale told in the voice of a spirited woman who doesn’t allow society to confine her as she forges ahead, sometimes at the edge of the law. Appleton has gifted the elusive Mrs. B.J. Dale a new and vivid life on the page.