Moon of the Turning Leaves
Waubgeshig Rice
Paperback / Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9780735281585
Random House Canada, October 2023, 320 pgs

Waubgeshig Rice’s follow up to Moon of the Crusted Snow, Moon of the Turning Leaves is a standalone novel set in the same post-apocalyptic world as the first. Moon of the Turning Leaves follows a similar tradition to the first novel and gives readers a look at a world where an Anishinaabe community works together to survive in a world that’s been dark for over a decade. A generation has been born since the first novel and is coming into their teen years. As the settlement, Zaag’igan, grows, the surrounding land is running low on resources to support the community.

The novel opens with a poignant birthing ceremony, setting the tone for the journey ahead—a delicate balance of hope and foreboding. With new life in the community, the community’s impact on the land around them comes into question. How much longer can they stay tucked away from the rest of the world before they must leave? Others have left before, never to return, and the journey from their last settlement was perilous with many lives lost along the way.

But fear of the past isn’t the way to keep the future alive.

So, a group—collectively referred to as the walkers—takes off from the deep bush of Canada to head south toward their ancestral lands by the Great Lakes. The walkers’ quest to reclaim their ancestral lands, now void of most colonizers, resonates deeply, echoing a collective longing for healing and restoration. Rice uses the environment they move through to strengthen this theme by showcasing the way nature has reclaimed a world that colonizers tried to clip and contain. As the walkers journey southward, driven by their duty to future generations and a profound sense of ancestral obligation, the bonds between land and people grow stronger.

What sets Moon of the Turning Leaves apart and makes it a unique post-apocalypse novel is Rice’s portrayal of apocalypse not as a distant myth or something that can only happen in horror novels, but as a lived experience. Something that has, and is, still happening to many people. Rice deftly navigates the complexities of post-apocalyptic life, weaving together moments of triumph and tragedy with an eye, not for jump scares and carnage, but for healing. Through the characters, readers get to witness what it’s like to reclaim one’s homeland even after the world ends.