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Moon of the Crusted Snow
Group Reads Discussions 2020
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"Moon of the Crusted Snow" - Discuss Everything *Spoilers*
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No Blade of Grass (or simply Grass) by John Christopher is a great book. Thanks Nicol for your review. I agree that it was immersive. And thank you for that clarification on Nick killing that man in Gibson and how that ties in with his association with Scott. See, if even forgotten which one of them it was who’d done the violent killing and for some reason I didn’t go back to find out. I think your explanation makes perfect sense.
I think we were all left pretty much in the dark about the nature of Scott, which was that he turned out to be a wendigo. It does seem as though this were kind of an after thought.
Not detailing the cause of society's collapse does bear on the categorization of the book. We are reading it as our science fiction pick. It was nominated for the Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Some of the top GR tags are science fiction. Yet I'm pretty sure that the author did not write it as such. So this seems to be another case of the genre's readers adopting a book that wasn't written with us in mind.
If it were longer, Scott would have been developed more, and so too the dreams, and the meeting scenes wouldn't have seemed too long. But I read it one evening (immersive indeed!) as a Fable. Given the perspective that these ppl have had two apocalypses already, and given the Scott as Wendigo, and given the lack of dramatic arc that some of you wished for, I think reading it as Fable, rather than traditional Literature or even (thanks Chris) as SF, works better.
After all, it does have a very clear set of moral lessons, having to do with honoring traditional wisdoms and living close to the land/bush.
Thank you all very much for convincing me to order this from ILL - I got it from the public library system of Tulsa OK.
Btw, Diane, I too remember power outages in the 70s in Wisconsin. And in Oklahoma City just a few weeks ago there was such an ice storm that hundreds of thousands of ppl, including my elder sons, were without power for up to two weeks, even in the city!Mother Nature will always win, one way or another.
That’s a good way of putting it, Cheryl. 2 weeks after having finished it, it is still fresh in my mind and pleasantly so. I did want to mention that we had one of the longest and best discussions about this book during our SFFBC Virtual Book Club. It was great.
I wrapped this one up much later than anticipated, as it is a fairly short novel and I started it on November 24th. But with a lot of stuff happening in real life, I was lacking brain space for reading. It didn't help that this book never really gripped me, making it easier for me to postpone going back to reading.I ended up giving it a 3-star rating, but only because I can see what the author is going for and I respect the way this novel is written. But for me it just never really came to be a SF novel, and I wonder if the novel would have profited from being longer, as it suddenly just barreled to the end. The tension from the first meeting with Scott was never achieved again, and I think this is what I was missing, a better build up to the endgame.
i think i gave this 4 stars but to be honest felt it was generous. I did quite enjoy it but again never really gripped me. I feel like there wasn't much in it that stood out from other similar apocalypse tales. I felt like this one had a very slow build up to the final confrontation that to me felt anti-climatic.
The element i did enjoy about it was its setting, embedded in a culture that i really don't know too much about. I thought also from a character point of view it was good. I did like Evan and his family. I think it would have been a good straight forward tale of survival. I think that Scott could have been left out altogether.
Feel like since i joined this group i have come across as quite critical of the two books i have read. Don't mean to be. I did quite enjoy this one but don't think it is one that will stay with me.
That's a good point... what would the story be like without the character of Scott? The survival story itself could be gripping. Kinda like Station Eleven... did it really need that cult town? I guess readers demand interpersonal drama... supposedly. But then we have The Martian, which is a hugely popular SF survival story. I dunno....
Good point, lori. I wanted it to be post-apoc., but it's really not. It's actually the fable about the structure of society etc. that you describe. Thanks for calling me out. :)
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This is the best use of that metaphor I think I've ever read.
Well said, Lori. And I think that’s why I liked this book as much as I did. I wish the author would have done more of the peeling though.
Totally agree on every point, Lori.
Hah! I'd forgotten completely, because, even though I read it as a fable, I *wanted* it to be more SF & post-apoc. / survival. I admire the author for getting good attempts at both kinds of stories in one short book!
I finished this book and found it so immersive. I echo a lot of the comments written by our group and don’t know that I have anything to add except appreciation for the discussion. Like many, I found the book immersive. I thought that the ending was too abrupt. Scott would’ve benefited from more depth, but I also felt that he was a symbol for a type of person. I enjoyed the language used, even though I merely read the book not listened to it.I found the depth of description of the culture highly interesting.
Lastly, the comment about this being a rewritten Fable was very interesting, as I was discussing what category this book fell into with my spouse earlier today. Fable makes a lot more sense to me.
Thanks again for a great read.
Liane, I read Rice saying somewhere that Scott was a wendigo, so definitely representing a type.
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The moving food back and forth. The meticulous care taken to inventory the food, yet seeming lack of surprise when food was missing. And after all that, Scott introduces cannibalism? There was food for two years and that wasn't counting the various frozen moose, geese, rabbits, etc, yet 3 months in people are starving. All of these plot elements can work, just not together. I think the author had several different plot trajectories in mind, but in the end went for the cannibalism angle, but lacked the time to go back and re-write earlier elements to true up, but hey, what do I know?