Book recommendations are rare for me.

Regardless I want to share a recommendation about an exceptional book. I hope you won’t mind too much. If you investigate and love it, that would please me very much.

The first time I read this book, the copy I read was obviously well read, the pages were soft from being passed along and read, then reread. It was actually the well read condition of the book that intrigued me and caused me to buy that second-hand copy and read it. I loved it and gave it away to someone to read after I gushed passionately about how interesting I found it.

Recently this book again came to mind, and I wanted to re-read it so I borrowed it again from the Penticton library. This time I found it in my library. Yay ! I love libraries!

In 1907 Laura left her comfortable life in Toronto to teach in a Yukon mining town, Dawson City which was nicknamed “Paris of the North“.

The book is “I MARRIED THE KLONDIKE” by Laura Beatrice Berton

I SUPPOSE in everyone’s life there eventually comes a moment when one’s future is suddenly changed. My own moment came one hot morning in Toronto in the summer of 1907. A voice on the telephone asked if I could leave at once to take charge of the kindergarten in Dawson City. As the salary offered was four times what I’d been getting I accepted immediately. Men rushed to the Klondike for riches; why not a 29-year-old schoolma’am?

My plan was to go for just one year and then return to Toronto. But I was never to live in Toronto again. I could not know that I would marry a sourdough, drive across the roof of the world in an open sleigh, spend a three-month honeymoon in a tent, raise a family in the north, Boat down the Yukon in a poling boat and live for twenty-five unconventional years in the unconventional little city of Dawson. If I had been transplanted to another planet the contrasts could not have been stranger.

Just over 225 pages, this is a soft covered paper book, and for me it was not a long read.

The book is humorous, and filled with stories of the hard life of this small city, it’s isolation, the unexpected grandeur and it captured my heart.

It did so because of the warm writing style, much like a journal of events and personal discovery. So much did I enjoy it, I want others to enjoy it also.

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As I get ready to publish this I am realizing that this book, I Married The Klondike may be hard to find. – Click here for help and itunes.

If you want to read more about the Klondike Gold Rush, her son Pierre Berton was a writer and a historian of the highest acclaim and success. Please seek out one of his Klondike books as an alternate, and you have many to choose from. I found a list of his writing on his Wikipedia page here.

Not in the mood for a book? – click here ♥ for delightfully narrated video by Pierre Berton. He shares about the city where he was born, the Paris of the North – learn about Whisky Hill and the men and the women in the video called City of Gold.

There will never again be a gold rush like the Klondike, where the excitement was such that nearly 1000 of the 4000 people in Seattle set out to the north, for fortune and attempt to overcome desperately difficult challenges.