Review: Mad Hell-Rush of Days by Natalie Appleton
Edmonton: Newest Press, 2026
This is the second book that I've read by Natalie Appleton, and both bring Canadian history to life very well. If you enjoy historical fiction and literary fiction, this book is a wonderful melding of the two. I was happy to review this book for The British Columbia Review. This article was originally published at The BC Review on September 27, 2026.
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There is something wonderful about immersing oneself in historical fiction, especially Canadian history that so beautifully brings the stories of people who fought hard to exist in an environment that didn’t make for easy living. Often they were fleeing circumstances in their birth countries that were difficult, or sometimes children of immigrants born into a Northern world both beautiful and harsh, but never easy. Vernon-based Natalie Appleton is a writer who is making a name for herself in bringing some of these stories to life on the page. A story from the edge of the prairie wilderness, Mad Hell-Rush of Days portrays Saskatchewan at the turn of the twentieth century.
This sophomore novel is an imagined retelling of the lives of two people: Spencer Pearse and Josephine Grant, from the Assiniboia region, which is now southern Saskatchewan. Appleton found records of both individuals in the book Ravenscrag: Between and Beyond the Benches. Her Afterword notes that Spencer’s character was to be “one paragraph,” but that his story grew as she discovered more and more records. Josephine/Josie (known as Tippa as a girl) was based on two historical women: “Josie Olsen Ouellette in her girlhood and Florence (Mimnaugh) Grant in her womanhood.”
The story begins far from the Saskatchewan prairie. Spencer is the youngest son of an English family in Suffolk and feels the odd one out with the pain of being different from his brothers, and acutely at odds with societal expectations. He’s in love with his best friend Val, and when the two men decide to leave Britain for Canada, Spencer anticipates freedom and adventure.
Was it the urges of the sea in the rain that had given Spencer the idea? He remembered being so frightened to give voice to it, his transatlantic scheme. And yet, it was not so unusual. Plenty of mates and kin were immigrating together. Good families were quite happy to send off their misfits.
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| Author Natalie Appleton |
Val, however, decides that he cannot cope with the new world, and leaves Spencer alone in this new land, heartbroken. Spencer makes his way across Canada to British Columbia, but he doesn’t stay long before he settles in the Assiniboia District, where he breeds horses.
For her part, Tippa is born in the Dakotas, but her family sets off for Saskatchewan when she’s a girl. The family of four finds a land that allows for a simple, rural life; even so, tragedy is never far, often only one snowstorm away. An engaging and sympathetic character, Tippa’s story takes shape as she grows into a young woman who marries local man Cliff, deaf from a teenage infection. They long to start a family of their own, but a pregnancy proves elusive.
This is the second novel that I’ve read by Appleton, and after enjoying her debut I Want to Die in My Boots, which captures the dynamic personality of Belle Jane and her adventures in the 1920s, I was looking forward to this one. I’m happy to say that this novel is just as enjoyable. Appleton’s writing is really something to be savoured, and read with attention. Her prose has a unique cadence, one that channels a stream of consciousness at times, allowing the reader to experience the action from the characters’ uncensored point of view. Occasionally the prose slips into the almost-poetic for a line or two. As Josie and her brother run along-side their father’s cart, Appleton conjures both childhood wonder and the magical prairie:
The grass, tipping into knolls like waves. Those knolls, hatch with black bushes. The prairie, giving them over to this other land that stood apart from all the rest for miles and for weeks. Trembling aspen, balsam poplar, white spruce. A moose. Cliffs, crevices cracking down in all directions. Clouds shaped like great ships, thick and almost suspended, almost somewhere. Like them.
As both Spencer and Josie’s stories play out over the years, their lives touch at critical moments. There is a twenty-five-year age gap between them, and their experiences are different in the extreme, but both address accumulated losses that shape their character and both are resilient survivors. The novel plays out as two separate stories much of the time, but Appleton allows Spencer and Josie to be touchstones for each other in times of physical and emotional crisis. It’s a clever choice that serves to unify the narratives and to avoid disjointedness. I got to see this era, and this Canada, from different perspectives and came away from the book feeling like I’d experienced a lot of pioneer life in a relatively short novel.
The last third of the book introduces Spencer’s journey to Vancouver in 1935, and I loved the BC connection. In her research, Appleton found documentation regarding the real Spencer Pearse’s run-in with a Vancouver bunco man—a swindler. The dust bowl years and the depression plagued the prairies, of course, but Vancouver was also ailing: “After the crash, by the spring of ‘30, the homeless and the hungry began eating out of the bins. They smashed the windows of Woodward’s to get to tins of salmon and jars of prunes.” Spencer, for all his common sense, finds himself at the wrong end of a con in this vibrant yet suffering metropolis.
Meanwhile, Josie makes her own journey back to South Dakota to visit family, running from her grief about infertility and finds, perhaps, a new path for her life.
For readers of literary historical fiction, Mad Hell-Rush of Days will satisfy, with its fully realized characters and evocative descriptions of central and western Canada in the late 1800s and early twentieth century. Appleton’s sometimes whimsical prose invites a contemplative reading and rewards with satisfying wordplay and sentences. Though life is understandably harsh and the environment at times unforgiving, Spencer and Josie create real meaning and joy from their experiences. Near the end of the novel, Spencer reflects on his life: “What luck, following his heart to this strange wild. And look what he’d made. When it was good, wasn’t it good?”
This is the second novel that I’ve read by Appleton, and after enjoying her debut I Want to Die in My Boots, which captures the dynamic personality of Belle Jane and her adventures in the 1920s, I was looking forward to this one. I’m happy to say that this novel is just as enjoyable. Appleton’s writing is really something to be savoured, and read with attention. Her prose has a unique cadence, one that channels a stream of consciousness at times, allowing the reader to experience the action from the characters’ uncensored point of view. Occasionally the prose slips into the almost-poetic for a line or two. As Josie and her brother run along-side their father’s cart, Appleton conjures both childhood wonder and the magical prairie:
The grass, tipping into knolls like waves. Those knolls, hatch with black bushes. The prairie, giving them over to this other land that stood apart from all the rest for miles and for weeks. Trembling aspen, balsam poplar, white spruce. A moose. Cliffs, crevices cracking down in all directions. Clouds shaped like great ships, thick and almost suspended, almost somewhere. Like them.
As both Spencer and Josie’s stories play out over the years, their lives touch at critical moments. There is a twenty-five-year age gap between them, and their experiences are different in the extreme, but both address accumulated losses that shape their character and both are resilient survivors. The novel plays out as two separate stories much of the time, but Appleton allows Spencer and Josie to be touchstones for each other in times of physical and emotional crisis. It’s a clever choice that serves to unify the narratives and to avoid disjointedness. I got to see this era, and this Canada, from different perspectives and came away from the book feeling like I’d experienced a lot of pioneer life in a relatively short novel.
The last third of the book introduces Spencer’s journey to Vancouver in 1935, and I loved the BC connection. In her research, Appleton found documentation regarding the real Spencer Pearse’s run-in with a Vancouver bunco man—a swindler. The dust bowl years and the depression plagued the prairies, of course, but Vancouver was also ailing: “After the crash, by the spring of ‘30, the homeless and the hungry began eating out of the bins. They smashed the windows of Woodward’s to get to tins of salmon and jars of prunes.” Spencer, for all his common sense, finds himself at the wrong end of a con in this vibrant yet suffering metropolis.
Meanwhile, Josie makes her own journey back to South Dakota to visit family, running from her grief about infertility and finds, perhaps, a new path for her life.
For readers of literary historical fiction, Mad Hell-Rush of Days will satisfy, with its fully realized characters and evocative descriptions of central and western Canada in the late 1800s and early twentieth century. Appleton’s sometimes whimsical prose invites a contemplative reading and rewards with satisfying wordplay and sentences. Though life is understandably harsh and the environment at times unforgiving, Spencer and Josie create real meaning and joy from their experiences. Near the end of the novel, Spencer reflects on his life: “What luck, following his heart to this strange wild. And look what he’d made. When it was good, wasn’t it good?”
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