I don't read apocalyptic fiction all that often, but this one, which has a snowy cover and a book jacket that talks about winter looming, kind of called to me as a good onset-of-cold-weather read, and boy was it ever. I listened to the audiobook, which has an especially excellent narrator, and this book blew me away. What makes it so brilliant, I think, is that it avoids a lot of the tedium of having to theorize/explain how the world ends that other apocalypse fictions are essentially centered around, and instead hones in on the question of what it means, really — how does life go on? Because the story takes place on an Anishinaabe reservation, this question is very different from what it would be elsewhere, and the events described are subtly folded into a longer history of the Anishinaabe people. The book is deliciously suspenseful and absolutely riveting, and very very real about the human casualties, but without being sensationalistically awful. It's a remarkable feat of storytelling.
The story begins with a sense of unease — a power outage, phone lines down — but it's a mild one, because after all, as the various characters remark to one another, this kind of thing happens all the time on the rez, just usually not all at once. The beginning of the book moves slowly, doing a lot of the work of world-building, and establishing a sense of isolation and detachment from the Canadian society beyond. We get to know and love our characters, and to learn about their lives. But tension and dread are building. Two young boys return from college in Toronto with grim tidings about the world's collapse, and then a stranger arrives. The community is confronted with the question of how to survive the harsh winter without any electricity or supplies from the outside world. And the rest of the book just dwells in that discomfort, exploring its nuances. It's absolutely brilliant.
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