Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

The band’s interdependency is a major aspect of the novel, because, in extreme circumstances, interdependency becomes a means of survival. The winters are extraordinarily long and harsh.

A few hundred of Evan’s people live on the reserve, which is a nearly self-sufficient community, particularly thanks to traditional hunting and fishing. In America, it would be the reservation of a Native American tribe.) The actual location is not specific, but the reserve is many miles from the nearest developed town. (Since Rice is Canadian, some of his terms might be unfamiliar. That location is the reserve for a First Nations band in northern Canada. But the story, one of survival, is terrifically powerful, a familiar narrative told in an unfamiliar location. It’s a simply written book, almost leaning to YA in its slow, deliberate sentences and plain vocabulary. The main character, Evan, is developed only to the extent he must be, and the language forgoes decoration and lyricism almost entirely. The remote community must fend for itself, and build a new way of life from the remains of the old. No one knows why, and no one arrives to explain. The trucks delivering groceries don’t come. First phones go down, and then TV and radio, and then power. Rice isolates and stretches this moment, setting his novel in a remote community and giving the story several months to unfold. It’s not a preface to apocalypse, and it’s not the postscript it takes place during the moment in which a society realizes that one kind of life is over, and another kind of life is going to be the norm. Moon of the Crusted Snow is a book on the cusp.

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice