#moon of the crusted snow

[phaedraismyusername]

This year some of my favourite books I read were written by indigenous American authors and I just wanted to shout out a couple that I fell in love with

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

Horror being my second most read genre, I did not think books could still get under my skin the way this one did lol. It follows four Blackfoot men who are seemingly being hunted by a vengeful... something... years after a fateful hunting trip that happened just before they went their separate ways. The horror, the dread, the something... pure nightmare fuel 10/10

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

An apocalyptic novel following an isolated Anishinaabe community in the far north who lose contact with the outside world. When two of their young men return from their college with dire news, they set about planning on how to survive the winter, but when outsiders follow, lines are drawn in the community that might doom them all. This book is all dread all the time, the use of dreams and the inevitability of conflict weighs heavy til the very end. An excellent apocalypse story if you're into that kind of thing.

My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

This book follows Jade, a deeply troubled mixed race teenager with a shitty homelife who's *obsessed* with slasher movies. When she finds evidence that there's a killer running about her soon-to-be gentrified small town, she weaponises that knowledge to predict what's going to happen next. I don't think this book will work for most people, it's a little stream of consciousness, Jade's head is frequently a very difficult place to be in, but by the last page I had so much love for her as a character and the emotional rollercoaster she's on that I had to mention it here.

Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger

Taking a bit of a left turn but this charming YA murder mystery really stuck with me this year. Elatsoe is a teenage girl living in an America where myths, monsters, and magic are all real every day occurrences. When her cousin dies mysteriously with no witnesses, she decides to do whatever she can, including using her ability to raise the spirits of dead animals, to solve the case. The worldbuilding was just really fun in this one, but the Native American myths and influence were the shining star for me, and the asexual rep was refreshing to see in a YA book too tbh

Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq

The audiobook, the audiobook, the audiobook!!!! Also the physical book because formatting and illustrations, but the audiobook!!! Tanya Tagaq is an Inuit throat singer, and this novel is a genre blending of 20 years worth of the authors journal entries, poetry, and short stories, that culminates in a truly unique story about a young girl surviving her teenage years in a small tundra town in the 70s. It is sad and beautiful and hard but an experience like nothing else I read this year.

#the only good indians #my heart is a chainsaw #stephen graham jones #moon of the crusted snow #waubgeshig rice #elatsoe #darcie little badger #split tooth #tanya tagaq #indigenous authors #2022 reads #book recs #books #booklr

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

#moon of the crusted snow #waubgeshig rice #post apocalyptic #thriller #book poll #have you read this book poll #polls

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Moon of the Crusted Snow | Author: Waubgeshig Rice | Publisher: ECW Press (2018)

#books #Moon of the Crusted Snow #Waubgeshig Rice

[wayvsphantom]

Books Read in 2023 - Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

5/5 ⭐️

#2023 books #moon of the crusted snow #2023books

[smokefalls]

Yes, apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived. We’re still here. And we’ll still be here, even if the power and the radios don’t come back on and we never see any white people ever again.

Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow

#Waubgeshig Rice #Moon of the Crusted Snow #quote #fiction #dystopian #2022 reads

[residents-of-the-darkforest]

#Read for class #It’s pretty good #scott sucks #notdf #moon Of the crusted snow #Meme #mr incredible #book #book meme

[fantabee]

August reading review! I am struggling to balance reading and writing in between working So Much Overtime.

Our Wives Under the Sea: 4/5. A haunting story of losing love and finding something Very Wrong. I think this book might have a specific audience and it might be me. The writing style was absolutely beautiful and just pulled me in.

The Poppy War: 3.5/5. I enjoyed this a lot but I wasn't obsessed with it. It was fascinating to watch Rin struggle as she did things she knew was wrong. I do plan on reading the sequel to see what choices Rin will make going forward.

Moon of the Crusted Snow: 4/5. This is a wonderful reflection of what has been and what could be and what could have been in regards to the Anishinaabe community. You can really feel the author's love for his culture in this story. The prose is bare bones, but I think it's fitting for a story about a post-apocalyptic winter.

This Thing Between Us: 5/5 my god I loved this book. I've never gotten so many goosebumps while reading something. The atmosphere was incredible and the main character's intense grief came across the page and stabbed me right in the heart. This story is complex and so, so haunting.

#book reviews #self post #bookblr #monthly book review #book blog #not writing #our wives under the sea #the poppy war #moon of the crusted snow #this thing between us

[peonybookblog]

Latest editions to my Top Shelf: Books I've Read and Loved list on Bookshop! Starting 2024 out with some really great books!

#books #moon of the crusted snow #cobalt red #book recs #bookblr

[thehappyscavenger]

Books Read November 2023

I read very few books but all of them Canadiana!

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

Found this very mediocre. It's a post apocalyptic survival tale set in a Northern Indigenous community. The writing was aggressively simple, there was no flow and the villain was such an obvious bad guy I was praying their would be a twist where he was good. How was/is this a best seller?

Valide by Chris Bergeron

I LOVED THIS SO MUCH. Unfortunately I picked up the English ARC before I realized this was originally written in French. It's a semi-autobiographical dialogue between a woman assigned male at birth and the machine programmed to observe her and take over her memories. It's so good. Probably one of my fave books of the year.

The Marigold by Andrew F. Sullivan

So after having a bad run with Canadian best sellers I was scared to pick this one up. Surprise, surprise it's actually good! Set in a near futuristic Toronto that is slowly being taken over by developers and a toxic mold called The Wet, this is a creepy wonderful depressive ride. Loved it.

Surrender by Joanna Pocock

I usually don't like non-fiction that much but I enjoyed this one which is a mix of travelogue/reportage/memoir. This is technically Canadiana but is set mostly in and around Missoula where Pocock lived for two years during a mid-life crisis. It's a lot about humans, ecology and how we deal with the ongoing climate crisis. It's bumpy and imperfect and ends on kind of a weird note but overall I enjoyed Pocock's thought and musings.

#Currently reading #Moon of the Crusted Snow #Waubgeshig Rice #Valid #Chris Bergeron #The Marigold #Andrew F. Sullivan #Surrender #Joanna Pocock

[tigger8900]

Moon of the Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 1/2

An Anishinaabe community is preparing for the long winter ahead when they abruptly find themselves cut off from the power grid, the phone network, and from every other element of society outside their reservation. The residents are better prepared than most, but resources are still finite, and when winter arrives in earnest it brings with it more than just snow.

I liked this a lot, as the change in perspective led to a different take on the post-apocalyptic genre. After all, as mentioned in the book, what's one more apocalypse to a people who have already weathered multiple? In addition, we're used to following such narratives from the perspective of the wanderer, rather than from the village the wanderer happens to wander into. I will say it takes a while to build tension, but by the time things really start going I was flipping pages, desperate to find out what happens next. I was reminded of Stephen King's social horror, where he introduces you to a small, self-contained community and then crumbles it before your eyes.

If you can go into the story without having the "monster" spoiled for you, I recommend it. See if you can figure it out yourself(there is enough information, but you have to have some background knowledge to recognize the clues), and if not you can read the acknowledgements at the back for a keyword to google. I actually liked that it wasn't completely spelled out in the text, because that allows two interpretations of the plot. I first enjoyed a plot taken literally, then did a bit of homework reading and got a bonus plot for my consideration.

My only real complaint is that some loose ends weren't tied up. A few characters just kind of disappeared near the end, with their fates unspecified after the climactic scene. For a book where the tension centered so much about the fate of the community, it's a glaring omission when the narrative seems to forget about members of said community. We also never get an answer as to what cut the community off in the first place. I was personally okay with that one, but I can see it being a dealbreaker for some people. There is a sequel coming out this fall, Moon of the Turning Leaves, which might hold some answers.

#books #book review #moon of the crusted snow #waubgeshig rice #the whitesky saga #post apocalyptic

[teenageread]

Review: Moon of the Crusted Snow

Synopsis:

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.

Plot:

Evan has lived in his Anishinaabe community his entire life, and never wants to leave. As a public works worker, his job includes blowing the community roads during the winter, and fixing them in the summer, and working with the community for anything they need. With winter approaching, Evan is using his allotted hunting days to hunt meat for his family so that they can survive throughout the winter. His family included his fiance Nicole, their two children, his parents, his older sister, the town’s elder and Evan’s role model Aileen, and maybe his little brother Cam, as Cam would rather play video games all day than take care of himself. Coming home with a moose, Nicole informs him that the TV signal is out, and in the morning cell phones had also lost reception. This is common, as the community has only been recently hooked up to the hydro grid that allowed things like satellite TV and cell phones to become a thing for this northern community. It was too soon that the power went out. With the connection to the hydro grid dead, the diesel generators in the community center only had enough to get them through February, and that was if everyone conserved power. With trouble brewing, it was not until two young members came back from a town in the south, where things were not looking bright. When a foreigner Scott shows up to the village, seeking refuge and something else, Evan puts his family and community first in these troubled times, hoping to make it out alive, as the death toll from this impossible winter keeps climbing, and hunger sets in on the community.    

Thoughts:

Waubgeshig Rice tells this wild and compelling story on what it takes to survive the north when the power is shut down. Told mainly from the perspective of Evan, but Nicole and Scott each get a chapter or two, you can really see this family man trying to keep his community alive during their hardship. Rice makes this story ominous and haunting with its slow plot that allows you to really sit with the characters, and feel every emotion this community goes through as their entire world changes. Evan as a character does not have much depth to him besides his urge to survive and provide for his family and friends, however, it is a fun character to follow around as he was in on all the actions happening to the community, and had the most amount of interaction with Scott. Rice’s writing was clean and to the point, as where the beginning part of the story was quite slow, Rice quickly picked up the plot and did not let go until the epilogue chapter. This story has a large Indigenous element to it, as the entire story took place on an Indigenous reservation in Northern Ontario (Canada), the community members were all Indigenous, besides Scott and the others he brought with him. This Indigenous element was seen in every action Evan makes throughout the story, why the community allowed foreigners in their time of need, and the language throughout the story. The spoken language is Ojibwe, and where Evan did not know much, he frequently spoke in Ojibwe as a form of greeting, describing an animal, and named his children Ojibwe names. Rice briefly mentions a topic on how alcohol was banned on the reservation, the reason why Indigenous peoples drink, and the guilt associated with alcohol that Evan feels. Rice described the pains of Residential School through its survivor Aileen, and how grateful she is to speak her language and practice her ways without punishment. You can feel the pride Evan has for his community and their belief value throughout the story, and why he hated Scott, not because he was white, but because he did not share the same values Evan did. Even though the story is not long in terms of length, Rice truly makes this a deep story by giving us a cast of characters, and a lot to think about in terms of our own chances of survival.    

Read more reviews: Goodreads

Buy the book: Amazon

#Moon of the Crusted Snow #Waubgeshig Rice #book review

[neverfruit]

Currently listening to moon of the crusted snow and it is so good. Hopefully I can finish it within the next few days

#moon of the crusted snow #morning shifts means like an hour and a half where i can listen to books while working #which is so convenient and truly makes it so much easier

[ravioliwings]

there should be more snow based apocalypse books

#i love snow based apocalypse books.... #sorry i should share with the class: currently reading moon of the crusted snow

[transgenderfivepebbles]

guy who's been listening to nothing but pafl songs, reading a book: getting some real pafl vibes from this

#ramblings #help im reading moon of the crusted snow for class and my mind is just blasting Strike 3 on loop #it is extremely paflcore though im right

[smokefalls]

Title: Moon of the Crusted Snow Author: Waubgeshig Rice Publication Date: October 2018 Publisher: ECW Press Genre: fiction, dystopian

This was a chilling book in two ways that I thought was balanced relatively well. Rice sets up a bleak world in the dead of winter that is incredibly atmospheric. The collapse into a post-apocalyptic world is a subtle one that slowly unfolds, creating a unique kind of suspense. Somewhat relatedly, Rice also has the reader think about the violence that Indigenous peoples have faced, especially the devastating impact of settler colonialism. And, for Indigenous peoples, they have been living in a post-apocalyptic world for centuries. I’m struck by this particular quote that captures such sorrows yet expresses resilience:

“Yes, apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived. We’re still here. And we’ll still be here, even if the power and the radios don’t come back on and we never see any white people ever again.”

Rice quietly yet boldly challenges the dystopian genre with an Indigenous perspective that will have the reader reconsider the definition of “post-apocalypse.”

Content Warning: death, suicide mentions, cannibalism (non-descriptive), gun violence, alcoholism (minor), blood

#Waubgeshig Rice #Moon of the Crusted Snow #book review #fiction #dystopian #2022 reads #booklr

[rattlinbog]

Books Read in 2022

January

The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit by Patricia Monaghan 

The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine 

February

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West by Catherine Fletcher

The Desolations of Devil’s Acre (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children #6) by Ransom Riggs 

Eifelhelm by Michael Flynn 

The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer 

March

The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley (reread)

The Lost Future of Pepperharrow by Natasha Pulley

April

The Parted Earth by Anjani Enjeti 

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar 

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy 

The Last Blue by Isla Morley 

Lone Stars by Justin Deabler 

All the Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South by Ruth Coker Burns

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

May

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro 

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (reread)

As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker 

LaRose by Louise Erdrich

A History of Native American Land Rights in Upstate New York by Cindy Amrhein 

June

Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang

Member of the Family: My Story of Charles Manson, Life Inside His Cult, and the Darkness That Ended the Sixties by Dianne Lake and Deborah Herman

These Silent Woods by Kimi Cunningham Grant

Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W.E.B. Dubois 

Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez 

A Marvelous Light by Freya Marske 

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

July

No Exit by Taylor Adams

The Wanderers by Meg Howrey 

A Tall History of Sugar by Curdella Forbes

Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu

Calypso by David Sedaris

My Antonia by Willa Cather 

The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700 by Elizabeth Howe

English Animals by Laura Kaye

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

August

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson

Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang 

The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street by Susan Jane Gilman (reread)

The Latecomers by Helen Klein Ross 

Unlikely Animals by Annie Hartnett

The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd

September

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak 

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

Country Roots: The Origins of Country Music by Douglas B. Green

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Golden Gates: The Housing Crisis and a Reckoning for the American Dream by Conor Dougherty

Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson (reread)

J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan by Andrew Birkin

The Lost Ones by Anita Frank

October

A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw

When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole

The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates

The Reddening by Adam Nevill

My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

November

It Happened in the Smokies... A Mountaineer’s Memories of Happenings in the Smoky Mountains in Pre-Park Days by Gladys Trentham Russell

Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey by James Rebanks 

Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres 

I Was Told There’d be Cake: Essays by Sloane Crosley

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin

December

Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait by Bathsheba Demuth

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter (reread)

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte (reread)

Mrs. Death Misses Death by Salena Godden

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

#books in 2022 #books #booklr #reading list #just finished moon of the crusted snow #i haven't even thought about which were my favorite books that i read this year yet