Moon of the Crusted Snow (Moon, #1) in Around the Year in 52 Books

Mar 15, 2025 Duygu rated it did not like it

Shelves: aty-2025, canada

The writing style and energy of the plot felt very “male” and extremely simplistic. The characters fell flat, the storyline was jagged and heavily focused on “white man bad” and “native traditions save the day”. This could’ve been brilliantly executed but it just fell flat for me.

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Dec 04, 2023 Jacqie rated it liked it

Shelves: read-round-the-usa-2023

Read Round the World 2023: North America

This is a different sort of take on the end of civilization. The book focuses on an Indigenous community in northern Canada with only tenuous contact with the rest of the world. Trucks deliver things like food and gas and some of their tribe have gone south for school or work but most people are focused on the day to day of survival- farming, hunting, maintenance and repair, family life.

Then a couple of days go by without radios picking up transmissions. Read Round the World 2023: North America

This is a different sort of take on the end of civilization. The book focuses on an Indigenous community in northern Canada with only tenuous contact with the rest of the world. Trucks deliver things like food and gas and some of their tribe have gone south for school or work but most people are focused on the day to day of survival- farming, hunting, maintenance and repair, family life.

Then a couple of days go by without radios picking up transmissions. The trucks don't come when they should. People start to get worried but the tribal government works to keep everyone calm.

Eventually, some young men make it back from where they'd been going to school in one of the cities to the south and the tribe gets a fuller picture. It's grim. At this point, they are short on fuel, short on food, and the long northern winter has arrived. The folks in charge try their best but they are scared, overwhelmed, and not prepared for anything quite like this.

Then another stranger follows the young men's snow machine tracks back to the tribe. He asks for and receives shelter. He's a big man, has weapons and seems comfortable with violence. Some folks are uneasy about him and at least one of the tribal leaders doesn't have the presence or authority to keep this newcomer from gaining followers and splintering the tribe. And this new guy has some ideas about how to survive the winter....

It wasn't hard to see where the story was going. Dreams that the characters have foreshadow everything. The concept was what interested me most. It's hard to remember here in suburbia that there are other ways to endure an apocalypse than picking grocery stores clean and stocking up on guns to exterminate your fellow humans. The people in the book have lived at the edges of the world and are comfortable surviving there but they still need quite a bit that gets transported in to them.

I felt like the end of the book was abrupt and didn't answer a couple of very important questions and I'm not sure why the author made those choices. ...more

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Apr 24, 2020 Jen K rated it really liked it · review of another edition

The world has ended with more of a whimper than a bang. First the satellites went out with TV, cell and internet services, then the power and the landlines. The small Anishinaabe community in northern Canada is used to going without, only a generation or two away from living off the land, forced to survive in the frozen tundra after being pushed off their land, but some are better prepared than others having lost some of the old ways such as hunting and stocking up for the coming winter. The com ...more

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Dec 02, 2023 Barbara rated it liked it · review of another edition

This tense, apocalyptic thriller is set on a relatively remote Anishinaabe reservation in a fictional version of northern Ontario. One day the telephones go down, then the radio and television, and finally the power. Supply trucks that regularly deliver food and other stapes stop showing up, and as winter sets in, conditions become more dire. No one knows why this happened, and they learn that it is more widespread than their own remote area when two young members of their tribe who were attendi ...more

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