This is a deeply sad and troubling, but also beautiful book. It’s so touching and thoughtful as well. We have a kind of collective or near collective community narrator telling about the effects and impacts of some kind of failure of America (a fall or a breakdown of social order) narrowly and tightly focused as it impacts an Anishinaabe community on the brink of winter. The community will be impacted, having only recently gotten on to the grid, because of their recent reliance on outside deliveries and shipments for food and fuel.
This recent change in their life now proves to be a complicated as the fall of the western grid (and who knows what else) puts them unprepared to deal with the changes. Now rationing food and fuel, faces the dangerous winter, they prepare to hunker down and ride out the season, when a white outsider comes across a scouting group and sort of bullies his way into the community bringing chaos, discord, and despair with him.
The novel is posed as a kind of post-apocalyptic novel, but as the narrator tells us in no uncertain terms, you can’t face an apocalypse if you’ve been party to hundreds of them before as oppressed peoples. So the fall itself is only an issue of resource management and being caught out like they were. Emotionally and socially, it’s only a matter of holding on and remembering. But sadness, despair, and desperation finds their way in and there’s a real danger of survival not because of the failure of their society, but of white society.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Moon-Crusted-Snow-Waubgeshig-Rice/dp/1770414002/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=crusted+snow&qid=1575044586&s=books&sr=1-1)