My children and I enjoyed reading The Great Gold Rush Adventure together a couple of days ago, and I was pleased that evening when they described the story to the older children at the dinner table. You know a book is memorable when they talk about it later! Something that made this book even more interesting than it already was is that we read a book a year or two ago about the same gold rush, and they were remembering things that were in that book, and also this one.
A dog stole Walter's lunch box one day, and in chasing him down, Walter inadvertantly ended up on board the steamship Portland, bound for the Yukon gold fields. A miner took the boy in hand, and they made their way to the Klondike. Along the way, they had to beware of pickpockets and scammers—and would they make a fortune when they reached their goal, or be like so many others who lost everything?
The pictures in this book are wonderful! They are full-color, realistic paintings, with so much detail in them that you could spend a lot of time studying them. In fact, after we read the story, we went back through and looked at the pictures for a second time. One picture of the Portland has a couple of cutaway sections, so we can see inside the hold. It shows the provisions and the engine room. The historical notes at the end of the book made us quite curious about some of the pictures, and we had fun looking for the details that were mentioned. In fact, those historical notes are very good—they fill in the gaps and tell the rest of the story that can't be fit into the picture book story.
The Great Gold Rush Adventure is a beautiful book that I would love to have on our shelf. I know my 2-year-old would claim it as her own and read it over and over, since it has a dog pictured on almost every page! It is one that the older children would sit and study whenever it was left laying around, too.
I received a review copy of this book from NetGalley, and these are my honest thoughts about it.

My review will also appear on www.ignitelit.com in February 2022.

The Great Gold Rush Adventure
by Kyle Griffith
Girl Friday Productions
Bird Upstairs Books
Children's Fiction
Pub Date 07 Sep 2021


I am reviewing a copy of the Great Gold Rush Adventure through Girl Friday Productions/Bird Upstairs Books and Netgalley:


This easy to read beautifully illustrated adventure will take the reader on an adventure that they aren’t likely to forget. You will be transported back to 1897 Gold Rush Era, Seattle which at the time is bustling with fortune seekers headed to the goldfields!



While Walter an errand boy chases an adventurous pup named Dusty onto a steamship bound for the Klondike, he also meets Hal, an old prospector. Soon the trio teams up on a Great adventure from Seattle’s Miners Landing to the icy shores of Alaska to the Golden Horseshoe Saloon to a frozen landscape with promises of riches underground—risking life and limb for a chance at making their fortune. Every miner dreams of gold, but will Walter, Dusty, and Hal be the ones to strike it rich?



Not only does The Great Gold Adventure tell the fictional tale of the trio, but it is tells the historic facts telling the reader how in 1897 hen a ship bearing two tons of gold from the Klondike docked alongside the site of Pier 57 in 1897, it triggered a gold rush that thrilled the world and led to Seattle’s establishment as a world-class city. The historical Minders Landing site, located on Seattle’s waterfront, where almost 7 million tourists visit each year, is just steps from the Seattle Aquarium and the Pike Place Market. It is home to one of Seattle’s most beloved tourist destinations, the Seattle Great Wheel, which 1 million visitors ride each year.



If you’re a child looking for an adventurous read or simply a child at Heart, I highly recommend The Great Gold Rush Adventure.


Five out of five stars!


Happy Reading!

It can be quite amazing what nuggets the book reviewing gods give you. I'm sitting here, 4,700 miles from Seattle, and reading a pair of books from a business drumming up self-serving puff pieces about the place. The sister volume to this is definitely on the advert side as opposed to being an actual kids' adventure read, but here we get a real dramatic story. It focuses on a kid getting drawn into the whole Klondike Gold Rush and all the drama, risk and effort that would have entailed. It's utterly unrealistic – he chases a dog that has snatched his packed lunch on to a ship, and neither get kicked off – indeed they fall in with the one old timer with a charitable enough outlook for them to form a cooperative team.

The strong sense of fantasy here has to struggle as a result to get the truth of the Gold Rush across, but I think it still succeeded. I can still see in my mind's eye the footage of the Chilkoot Trail and how everything you could possibly need had to be back-breakingly lugged up the mountains. (I hadn't realised a lot of the stuff was portaged because the shop-keepers had made up invented laws about what the gullible had to tote.) So yes, this does serve as a most educational memento of seeing that corner of the world, or as a lesson in local history for those young readers growing up there now. But it's still not perfect – it is a bit ungainly in its edutainment, and for a book whose fantasy and illustrations pitch quite young, it has a lot of text, in small font, that would be off-putting to many. Still, I can't really sniff at the pride the creators have in their location and the stories it contains. Three and a half golden twinklies from me for their efforts here.