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I tore through this book, and might just re-read it immediately, which is something I never do.

It starts out as a fantasy story that feels exceptionally weird because Chandrasekera's willing to do his world building / exposition very slowly. I kept going through a lot of confusion because the writing itself is just so beautiful. And then gradually as the exposition falls into place it becomes clearer that the book is at least partly a critique of religious fanaticisms and chauvinisms... but each time I felt I really had a handle on the book something in its world would shift - either the protagonist learning a new piece of his own story or a significant detail the the author waited until a dramatic moment to show the reader. Even the ending feels like another instance of that, and it is a relatively unclear ending, though it fits the whole mood of the book enough not to be frustrating.

To be clear: I like this kind of storytelling better than spending pages and pages on worldbuilding before anything happens, and all loose ends tied up by the conclusion. It just needs a damn good writer to make it work, and Chandrasekera is one. I also never felt like I was more confused than the protagonist himself, which I think is how the book managed not to fall into feeling like a cheap trick.

After reading it, I read up on the story of Rāhula, and realised that many more details in this book are clearly-intentional references to that than I'd picked up on. And I read some Sri Lankan history and realised that much of what felt like echoes of Myanmar or Israel were more direct references to specific aspects of Sri Lanka's civil war. Part of why I want to re-read is to have those things in mind, but I think it's also a strength of the book that it works as a more general allegory too. I think I would advise other readers to go in the same order as me: dive into the book first, and catch up on its references after.

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Moon of the Crusted Snow is a story about a small, remote Anishinaabe community surviving through the beginning of an apocalypse. Power goes out, communication is down, and they turn inward to try to take care of their community, through leadership struggles, limited food, and the chaos of taking in strangers. I read this as a part of July's #SFFBookClub book.

I quite enjoyed the smaller focused story of survival here, where the outside world is at the margins. It centers a small Anishinaabe community, and about its dread and uncertainty and adaptation as everything starts to slowly unravel when winter sets in.

For me, the part that set the tone of the entire story was the conversation that Evan Whitesky has with the elder Aileen Jones, about halfway through the book. She says that there's no word for apocalypse in Ojibwe. But more than that, she says that their world already ended much earlier when they were forced out of their original land, and ended again when their children were stolen. That they've seen disaster over and over and have always been resilient and survived.

To me, that conversation feels directly juxtaposed with Evan's musing a few pages later about the phrase the moon of the crusted snow--he remembers teachers having a disagreement about whether that phrase referred to the month at the peak of winter or a month where it alternated between freezing and mild temperatures. In the context of Aileen's conversation, it feels like the title itself is about ambivalent ways of looking at disaster--one perception of it being the worst thing that's ever happened, and another saying that this is not the first time this has happened, and providing some future-looking hope for milder times.

This book is in three parts, the first of which would have made a satisfying short story on its own, the second feels like a solid continuation, but the third started to feel a bit formulaic even as it escalated things.

The parts I enjoyed the most were Lagos-as-character, the idea that there are multiple pantheons which know each other but have limited power over each other, and the way David's character evolved. Though he does get distinctly less likable over the course of the story, which feels right in terms of the world building but made me feel less engaged.

[#SFFBookClub June 2024]

In a lot of ways, this reminds me of the Akata series, but for adults - Nigerian setting, making friends and enemies with supernatural entities, Nsibidi script as magic writing, etc. (This is not a criticism of the Akata series, I love them.)

The setting was the best part of this for me - I enjoyed postapocalyptic, god-ravaged Lagos.

I appreciate that David is imperfect and fallible - he makes mistakes, fails, etc., and it has real consequences for him.

The first section (book? sub-book?) was my favorite, followed by the second - as the story progressed, I felt like it kept getting progressively more frantic and less coherent.

Overall, I enjoyed it, though, and I'm looking forward to more.

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#SFFBookClub didn't select this book, but #QueerRomanceClub did, and I've been curious about it anyway so time to join in.

There's an interesting world here, enough so that I did enjoy reading this book, but I never ended up caring much what happened to the characters. So it was pleasant enough but never really reeled me in.

I think this is just how I feel about Vo's writing in general, because I remember having a pretty similar reaction to The Empress Of Salt And Fortune. I can see what people who love her writing see in it, but it just isn't for me.

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