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How to review this without spoilers for things that it is definitely worth encountering at the speed they're written?

I found this a hard book to read, because so much of the plot is driven by the protagonist making decisions that are clearly bad in the moment they are made. I felt a bit like the stereotypical moviegoer wanting to shout "no, don't do it" at the screen. But I ultimately came to see it as a classic tragedy: a whole series of painful events driven by the hero's fatal flaw. And it is all aspects of the same flaw, and the flaw is one that's very recognisable looking around at society.

It's also a story of the right size for the novella format. Sometimes I get frustrated that novellas feel incomplete, rushing to an ending and/or leaving too few characters fleshed out. This one just felt tightly focussed.

And it has one of the best closing sentences of anything I've read, up there with The Dispossessed for how perfectly it recapitulates the whole story, and how little it will mean prior to having read the story.

#SFFBookClub

As it happens, this book was written by a good friend's brother. But it's also about a couple of questions close to my heart: what of the ideals of communism can be salvaged from the horrors of 20th century "Actually Existing Socialism" as practiced, and how can we be appropriately critical of those horrors without throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

It's perilous ground, and I've already found things to argue with in the first chapter. But he's a good writer who clearly knows the field deeply, and I am interested to see where he takes it.

I appreciated how much this book fills out the world and culture of its setting through individual characters' stories, without having to do a lot of Worldbuilding per se. I found each main character in some way relatable, and particularly enjoyed the way their initially disparate stories gradually get connected to each other. In the end I didn't find it quite as satisfying as the more tightly focussed stories of the first two books, but it's very nicely done and has a lot of very timely stuff to say about ways people care for each other or fail to, and about both emigration and immigration.

@picklish@books.theunseen.city Now that I've read it, I'm curious what you found contrived towards the end?

I found this a very satisfying continuation and conclusion of the story started in Moon of the Crusted Snow. It has a very different mood and focus, so much so that in this review I'm trying to avoid spoilers for the previous book more than for this one. Where Crusted Snow gets a lot of its tension from us as readers learning things as the protagonists do, this one is mostly not a suspenseful story. The broad outline of how things have to go is apparent from early on, and most of what makes it interesting is atmosphere and character development. Even the cover art of the two books does a pretty good job of communicating their relative moods.

I'm pretty sure this book would stand alone far better than most sequels do, because it largely follows a character too young to remember the events of or background to the first book. This neatly gives Rice a way to work in some rehashing naturally as people answering her questions, but also this book fills in a lot of information that none of the characters knew during the first one. That said, I'd still recommend reading Crusted Snow first because the most emotional parts of this story are bound to have more impact if you've had longer to get invested in the older characters.

CWs: racist violence, and this one's a real tear jerker.

#SFFBookClub (we read the first one as part of the book club last year)

@futzle Yay! A little way in I am getting that feeling, like it's the zoom out after two very tightly focussed stories about a small group of people. I think I like that she did that in this order, rather than the classic SF/F frontloaded worldbuilding.

Sherman's reflections on the writing of this are worth a read: siouxchef.substack.com/p/reflections-on-creating-turtle-island

@j12i@weirder.earth Oh that's very disappointing. But thank you for letting me know. My test must have been accidentally still logged in.