Moon of the Crusted Snow
A Novel
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4.2 • 163 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
2023 Canada Reads Longlist Selection
National Bestseller
Winner of the 2019 OLA Forest of Reading Evergreen Award
Shortlisted for the 2019 John W. Campbell Memorial Award
Shortlisted for the 2019/20 First Nation Communities READ Indigenous Literature Award
2020 Burlington Library Selection; 2020 Hamilton Reads One Book One Community Selection; 2020 Region of Waterloo One Book One Community Selection; 2019 Ontario Library Association Ontario Together We Read Program Selection; 2019 Women’s National Book Association’s Great Group Reads; 2019 Amnesty International Book Club Pick
January 2020 Reddit r/bookclub pick of the month
“This slow-burning thriller is also a powerful story of survival and will leave readers breathless.” — Publishers Weekly
“Rice seamlessly injects Anishinaabe language into the dialogue and creates a beautiful rendering of the natural world … This title will appeal to fans of literary science-fiction akin to Cormac McCarthy as well as to readers looking for a fresh voice in indigenous fiction.” — Booklist
A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice
With winter looming, a small northern Anishinaabe community goes dark. Cut off, people become passive and confused. Panic builds as the food supply dwindles. While the band council and a pocket of community members struggle to maintain order, an unexpected visitor arrives, escaping the crumbling society to the south. Soon after, others follow.
The community leadership loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve. Tensions rise and, as the months pass, so does the death toll due to sickness and despair. Frustrated by the building chaos, a group of young friends and their families turn to the land and Anishinaabe tradition in hopes of helping their community thrive again. Guided through the chaos by an unlikely leader named Evan Whitesky, they endeavor to restore order while grappling with a grave decision.
Blending action and allegory, Moon of the Crusted Snow upends our expectations. Out of catastrophe comes resilience. And as one society collapses, another is reborn.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Waubgeshig Rice imagines a dystopia that’s so plausible, it stirs up real anxiety. After mysteriously losing power and cell reception, an Anishinaabe reservation in northern Canada is barely getting by—and then an unexpected visitor shows up. His arrival tests the existing social hierarchy and drastically shifts loyalties. Rice’s prose is as spare as the resources in his chilly wilderness, and his story is exceptionally compelling and unsettling. Indigenous lit is having a well-deserved moment in the spotlight; with provocative tales like this, we expect it to be a long and exhilarating moment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fall is just about to turn into winter when cell service goes out in a Anishinaabe community in Rice's chilling post-apocalyptic novel (following Legacy). The novel centers on Evan Whitesky, a young father to two children living on a reservation in northern Canada who is attempting to relearn and maintain the traditional ways in a world where society has collapsed and electricity, cell phones, land lines, and satellites have all disappeared. In the absence of all the things that make the long, harsh winters of northern Canada easier, the community has to band together to ensure its survival, doling out canned provisions and trying to ensure running water and heat for everyone for as long as possible. When a man arrives seeking refuge from the chaos in the south, Evan and his community allow him to stay in spite of their misgivings. As the winter progresses and hunger sets in, hostility rises and small-town power struggles become a life-or-death affair. This slow-burning thriller is also a powerful story of survival and will leave readers breathless.
Customer Reviews
Beautifully Written, Fast Read
Waubgeshig Rice’s prose falls off the page and into your mind. It’s that easy… I’ve never read a book where the author’s craft is so well put together, silky and simple and flowing in a way that makes the pages race by. It is an authentic voice, peppered with Anishinaabe words (that somehow without any explanation make sense), and very eloquent and elegant in an engaging way, without ever feeling “fancy” (which would be out of place among the stoic and often lonely people inhabiting this story). I want to compare the writing style here with Ernest Hemingway, in its muscular simplicity, but with Hemingway there was a sense that he was actively and constantly working to air out and empty his normally fairly baroque style. With Rice, one gets the feeling that this is simply his real self and the real selves of the people he knows and grew up with. When the world ends, the citizens of a northern Ontario reservation hunker down for the winter and get by, as their ancestors did, with minimal fuss. The brief scenes that take place in the cities to the south demonstrate how that matter-of-fact attitude is sorely and terrifyingly missing among the “civilized” people. It would have been an idyllic story too, except that inevitably, people arrive from the south and the whole of human emotion, frailty, and greed change everything. This book is a very quick read, but it will stick with you for a while especially if, like me, you grew up in those places.
Atmospheric
Rice has mastered suspense. The tension increases with every word until the gruesome end. It is interesting readers never find out what happened in the South but the point is that it doesn’t matter. To these characters that is not their world. My only criticism is the character of Scott is stereotypical and flat. His only purpose is to provide conflict but this could have been a story of survival and been more realistic for it.
Interesting read!
I enjoyed this book. It was an interesting and informative read. A good page turner of a story, with a pretty plausible story line.