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sophia_sol) wrote2021-03-30 08:26 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2021-03-30 08:26 pm
Moon of the Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice
As you may know if you read my book posts regularly, I am a wuss. And this is a work of apocalyptic fiction. And I am a wuss!! It's very tense and emotionally intense in places. It's really good though so I am glad I read it.
Set in a community of Anishinaabe people on a remote reservation in northern Ontario, when issues start occurring everyone's just like "ah yes just another day on the rez, of course the power's out and nobody's telling us what's up." But soon it becomes clear that the situation is bigger than just their community, and something they can't expect to be fixed anytime soon.
Something I appreciated about the perspective this book brings to the genre is that Indigenous people have already been through several apocalypses, brought upon them by the white colonizers. A recurring theme of the book is the various members of the community doing their best to learn their traditional ways and traditional language, when for many years Canadian governmental policies deliberately divorced them from being able to maintain their traditions and heritage. They have already been working to rebuild in a post-apocalyptic setting.
So as an elder in the community tells Evan, the main character, their people have survived the apocalypse before and they'll survive this new one too.
This is a short novel but it packs a lot in. And it doesn't bother with irrelevancies such as: what actually went wrong in the south, what's the cause of this particular apocalypse? There are other priorities!
My only criticisms are that the opening of the book is a little infodumpy, and the time skip near the end of the book is a little disorenting. It's also a little male-focused in a way that makes you think "ah yes a man definitely wrote this" but not in like, a "the man who wrote this hates and/or doesn't understand women" kind of way. But this book is excellent at doing the things it sets out to do, and I highly recommend it.
Set in a community of Anishinaabe people on a remote reservation in northern Ontario, when issues start occurring everyone's just like "ah yes just another day on the rez, of course the power's out and nobody's telling us what's up." But soon it becomes clear that the situation is bigger than just their community, and something they can't expect to be fixed anytime soon.
Something I appreciated about the perspective this book brings to the genre is that Indigenous people have already been through several apocalypses, brought upon them by the white colonizers. A recurring theme of the book is the various members of the community doing their best to learn their traditional ways and traditional language, when for many years Canadian governmental policies deliberately divorced them from being able to maintain their traditions and heritage. They have already been working to rebuild in a post-apocalyptic setting.
So as an elder in the community tells Evan, the main character, their people have survived the apocalypse before and they'll survive this new one too.
This is a short novel but it packs a lot in. And it doesn't bother with irrelevancies such as: what actually went wrong in the south, what's the cause of this particular apocalypse? There are other priorities!
My only criticisms are that the opening of the book is a little infodumpy, and the time skip near the end of the book is a little disorenting. It's also a little male-focused in a way that makes you think "ah yes a man definitely wrote this" but not in like, a "the man who wrote this hates and/or doesn't understand women" kind of way. But this book is excellent at doing the things it sets out to do, and I highly recommend it.
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Something else that is fun though, and can also be an antidote to that feature of post-apocalyptic literature, is historical fiction about some of those previous ends-of-the-world. Some of Rosemary Sutcliff's historical fiction does that, for example--focusing on the end of the Roman Empire.
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