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Overall, this book didn't work for me. After finishing it, I found out that Counterweight was originally intended as a low budget scifi movie and it feels like it. The characters are thin, and there are almost more characters talked about off page than we see on page. The book emits its ideas in a smoke cloud of cyberpunk chaff without engaging deeply with any of their implications.

This is a cliché critique, but most of what didn't work for me was how much this book told instead of showed. There's an entire chapter midway through where the protagonist dumps the backstory of the old LK president's misdeeds that they've chosen not to share with the reader until that point. The book continually laments how AI will slowly run more of the world and humans won't be necessary, but we see little evidence (and directly very little of AI in general).

Here's some more blabs about AI in this book that I've left in a second comment for length.

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Moon of the Turning Leaves was an enjoyable follow-up to Moon of the Crusted Snow. (Every month can be #SFFBookClub sequel month if you want it to be.) If the first book was about turning inwards and more immediate survival, then this second book feels much more about turning outwards. I liked that it explains a little bit more about the what and why of the events outside their community. That said, this too is not a book directly concerned about answering these questions, and its focus remains on community and survival.

It feels akin to other post-apocalyptic journey stories, about survival, strangers, and trust. Nangohns represents the younger generation and to me feels like the focal point of the book. I love her growth into more authority, and especially her speech a third of the way into the book that convinces everyone to keep going. If I had a disappointment, it's that narratively it felt a bit too straightforward, and that the climax of the book has one outcome that felt somewhat contrived even if thematically on point.

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.