Moon of the Crusted Snow

[psocoptera]

Moon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice, 2018 sf novel. The power and phones go out in a small Ojibwe Anishinaabe community in northern Ontario; they slowly realize there is a more widespread (national? global?) breakdown happening, although they (and we) never find out much about it. I found this most interesting in its low-key "how might these people react and adapt to this" parts and less interesting when it got bogged down in the inevitable white man antagonist trying to take over/take advantage. I mean, that definitely is how that would go down and it's fair for Rice to say so but I didn't really feel like we needed an antagonist beyond the situation. I have heard the idea before that for indigenous/First Nations people the apocalypse already happened (in 1492/1620/local year of colonization); Rice states that explicitly, in a conversation between the protagonist and the wise elder, that their world has ended repeatedly and they've survived, so this apocalypse is just another one. Possibly this book is one of the places that originated or popularized that idea? Anyways it felt like an important work of the postapocalyptic genre, and I'm definitely curious to read the sequel and see where Rice takes it.