MOON OF THE CRUSTED SNOW by Waubgeshig Rice (ECW Press, October 2018) Paperback, 218 pages. ISBN # 1770414002 / 9781770414006. Nominee for John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel 2019
Summary on the Goodreads website . . . . .
A daring post-apocalyptic thriller 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.
My review on the Goodreads website . . . . .
This is a short but powerful, though-provoking novel. While reading Moon Of The Crusted Snow, I was reminded of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. While that book dwelt with a father and son effort to make their way in a post-apocalypse world, Rice's story centers on an entire (but small) isolated community of Native Americans in a wintry cold reservation in northern Ontario, Canada.
If a global power failure occurred without any chance of recovery, how would civilization proceed? Who would survive, and who would fail to thrive? The cold, bitter snow-and-ice-laden setting helps to enhance the sense of isolation and emergency.
I'm impressed with the pacing and writing style. I liked how the introduction to main character Evan and the village created a sense of well-being, calmness, and community. When the power fails, things begin to fracture, and the sense of community begins to crack. I thought the build-up to this was appropriately slow, and more effective because of it.
If any community could survive the loss of technology, it would be the original tribes who wandered the lands and lived off the Earth. In the modern community of Rice's story there remain elders who remember the old ways and took steps to prepare for a potential emergency of this nature. Evan, a caring family man with a community-minded dedication to service, straddles the line between the old and new ways. Those younger members of the village who are better acquainted with the luxuries of electrical power, Internet and television, become the first to panic and complain when it's taken out of their life.
The story is full of symbolism and Rice does a great job of contrasting what is occurring within the community with what occurred multiple times during the history of indigenous people of North America. He does not refer to it directly within the story, but what happens alludes to it repeatedly.
In the beginning days of the United States, Native Americans welcomed the Puritans and pilgrims who landed on their shores - - and later came to regret their goodwill towards the visitors who first brought new diseases and later segregated and confined them to sparser lands. Likewise, the community in Rice's novel welcomes some white outsiders who go on to influence and direct the community in the wrong directions - - something that was chillingly depicted in McCarthy's The Road but is handled with restraint and subtlety here.
I was a little disappointed with the ending, expecting more. Rice could have easily extended the story. However, having made his points, it seems as if he's left it to readers to speculate further.
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