A review by levininja
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
Did not finish book.
First, for the good. The narrator on the audiobook is very good. The First Nations accent is evocative and clear. Wonderful job on that front. Also, I really enjoyed the setting. I would love to hear a good story told of a post-apocalyptic period on a rez. More Native American stories would be welcome in general, but especially in this context, it seems fitting. I appreciate that idea.
However, after getting 30% of the way through this (2 hrs) and continually waiting for something to happen, I had to stop. Note, I push myself through a lot of books. But this one suffered from an egregious lack of anything happening. 2 hours into the book and only one plot point has happened: the services went out. Has anyone done anything meaningful about it? No. They’ve just noticed that the services are out and talked about it. A week into the outage, has a single person thought to drive outside of the rez and see what’s happening? No. They all just say, “well, let’s wait for the power to come back on. I’m sure it will eventually.” Fascinating. I feel that if a book can’t pull me in even slightly by the time I’m 30% through then, well—it’s just not going to.
Now, I don’t require that all books have a fast plot. Quite the contrary. But in the absence of a fast plot there must be something else to hold the attention. There needs to be interesting dialogue, or interesting character revelation, or interesting narration at least, or some poetry, something, anything—but unfortunately that’s not the case.
The book is almost entirely every-day narration of every-day events and every-day dialogue. The author seems to have fallen into the trap of thinking that everything that has to happen in a scene must be described. No, I don’t need to know that he walked to the phone, then picked up the receiver, and then put the receiver of the phone up to his ear and listened for a few moments, while standing there, hoping to hear a signal so that it would tell him if they still had landline service, but then he put the receiver down, discouraged that the line was dead. (Although I am hyperbolizing here.)
I try to judge a book by what it was trying to do. The desciption of this book includes the words “thriller” and “literary”. After 2 hrs of listening to this, I think I can definitively say, this is not a thriller. If no fear or horror or even action has happened whatsoever in the first 2 hrs—it’s not a thriller. I hope we can all agree on that.
On the term “literary,” that is much more subjective. One of the definitions of “literary” is that it is character-driven instead of plot-driven. While I can agree that it’s certainly not plot-driven, being character-driven is not merely an absence of being plot-driven. The characters are not revealed or developed in deep ways. Sure there are little things here and there, but no more character development/revelation than your average genre fiction, to be honest. We aren’t given hardly any insight into the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters at all.
Another definition of “literary” is that it involves the human condition. This is even more subjective, and to anyone who disagrees I would fully respect that disagreement, but for me at least, I did not feel that this was seriously discussing the human condition. There simply wasn’t much being revealed about the characters besides their simple outward actions, which were by-and-large not actions other than any generic person might take.
So for me at least, I felt duped by the promises of this novel—1) thriller, and 2) literary—and cannot recommend it.
However, after getting 30% of the way through this (2 hrs) and continually waiting for something to happen, I had to stop. Note, I push myself through a lot of books. But this one suffered from an egregious lack of anything happening. 2 hours into the book and only one plot point has happened: the services went out. Has anyone done anything meaningful about it? No. They’ve just noticed that the services are out and talked about it. A week into the outage, has a single person thought to drive outside of the rez and see what’s happening? No. They all just say, “well, let’s wait for the power to come back on. I’m sure it will eventually.” Fascinating. I feel that if a book can’t pull me in even slightly by the time I’m 30% through then, well—it’s just not going to.
Now, I don’t require that all books have a fast plot. Quite the contrary. But in the absence of a fast plot there must be something else to hold the attention. There needs to be interesting dialogue, or interesting character revelation, or interesting narration at least, or some poetry, something, anything—but unfortunately that’s not the case.
The book is almost entirely every-day narration of every-day events and every-day dialogue. The author seems to have fallen into the trap of thinking that everything that has to happen in a scene must be described. No, I don’t need to know that he walked to the phone, then picked up the receiver, and then put the receiver of the phone up to his ear and listened for a few moments, while standing there, hoping to hear a signal so that it would tell him if they still had landline service, but then he put the receiver down, discouraged that the line was dead. (Although I am hyperbolizing here.)
I try to judge a book by what it was trying to do. The desciption of this book includes the words “thriller” and “literary”. After 2 hrs of listening to this, I think I can definitively say, this is not a thriller. If no fear or horror or even action has happened whatsoever in the first 2 hrs—it’s not a thriller. I hope we can all agree on that.
On the term “literary,” that is much more subjective. One of the definitions of “literary” is that it is character-driven instead of plot-driven. While I can agree that it’s certainly not plot-driven, being character-driven is not merely an absence of being plot-driven. The characters are not revealed or developed in deep ways. Sure there are little things here and there, but no more character development/revelation than your average genre fiction, to be honest. We aren’t given hardly any insight into the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters at all.
Another definition of “literary” is that it involves the human condition. This is even more subjective, and to anyone who disagrees I would fully respect that disagreement, but for me at least, I did not feel that this was seriously discussing the human condition. There simply wasn’t much being revealed about the characters besides their simple outward actions, which were by-and-large not actions other than any generic person might take.
So for me at least, I felt duped by the promises of this novel—1) thriller, and 2) literary—and cannot recommend it.