Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

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A friend was reading this for school and the blurb sounded interesting so I decided to read it and I was mostly not disappointed.

I'm going to start with the meh things so we end on a good note. At the beginning, the writing style was pretty basic and it didn't really make me think about what was written. For example, instead of saying "my eye lids were fighting to stay open", (please don't judge my ✨phenomenal✨ writing skills), the author would just say "I was tired". This isn't something bad necessarily, it's mostly personal preference because I like more poetic language.

Another "meh" thing about the book was the ending. I actually really enjoyed the pacing in the whole book, but the end just felt really rushed and it felt like Waubgeshig Rice just wanted to get it over with. After finishing the book, I was pretty confused about the ending and the epilogue didn't really provide any answers, if anything I just had more questions. (I'm not sure if it was slightly ambiguous on purpose, or I just understood it wrong.)

Let's move the the positives now because there were certainly a bunch. First of all, I want to talk about the pacing. I really enjoyed the pacing of the book and how each chapter was split because it just amplified the severity of the situation. Other than the little hiccup of the ending, the book was pretty easy to read and there was always something new happening.

This book is definitely a social commentary and I really enjoyed how the author went about doing it. It felt subtle but effective and it gave me a new perspective to view life on reserves and the implications of the south. I loved the plot because it gave the word apocalypse a totally new meaning that doesn't involve falling rocks or zombies or explosions. It felt very realistic and the just made it even more chilling because I could actually see it happening in real life.

Overall, I really liked this book not only for the very accurate social commentary, but also on the interesting plot.

⭐⭐⭐⭐/5