el dang reviewed Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
A daring post-apocalyptic novel from a powerful rising literary voice. With winter looming, a small …
The power of a tight focus within a bigger story
5 stars
Content warning plot, setting, and ending spoilers
It took me a little while to get hooked by this book, but in the end I loved it and found it very haunting.
What really made it work for me is that there's a cliched SF cataclysm in the background--electricity and everything that depends on it going down--but the story is so focussed on one small community's response that we never learn why or how that happened. The lack of answers could have been frustrating, but I found it really tightened the focus and let this be a story about a few characters instead of about technology.
There were two things that frustrated me a little. One was a bit too much explaining vs showing, both about Anishinaabe culture and sometimes what was going on in a given character's head. I can see the first part of that being necessary to give the book a wider audience, but I wish it had been footnotes or something like that.
The other frustration, which I see at least one other reviewer on here shared, was at the characters themselves for not doing more about Scott sooner. But that's not really a weakness of the story, in that it feels quite plausible that Evan and his closest friends all realised how big trouble Scott was going to be and simply couldn't act, between being very preoccupied with day to day survival, and having to navigate a very disunited community.
That said, the ending really did take me by surprise. I'd been assuming that Scott's plan was to raid the canned food store and maybe some families' frozen meat stashes, which would have been a much less interesting way for it to go. I am curious whether someone more steeped in windigo stories would have been quicker to pick up on that being what Rice was painting Scott as; for me the reveal was a gut punch.