In Moon of the Turning Leaves, Waubgeshig Rice returns to the post-collapse landscape first explored in Moon of the Crusted Snow—but this time, the story blooms outward. Years have passed since the grid went dark and modern civilization slipped into myth. What remains is not despair, but renewal: a community of Anishinaabe survivors rebuilding their world with quiet determination and ancestral wisdom. This isn’t an apocalypse story in the Hollywood sense. Rice writes with patience, reverence, and an almost meditative rhythm. His prose hums with the life of the northern wilderness—the hiss of wind through birch, the creak of frozen lakes, the soft footfall of hunters tracking through morning mist. Within that beauty lies unease. Food is scarcer, the seasons unpredictable, and a new generation feels the pull to explore what’s left of the wider world. When a small group sets out to journey south, their expedition becomes more than a search for new land—it’s a spiritual and cultural homecoming. Along the way, they encounter reminders of the broken world that once was, and hints of how its mistakes might repeat. Rice’s gift lies in finding meaning within stillness: danger builds not from explosions, but from silence, memory, and moral weight. What makes Moon of the Turning Leaves remarkable is its tone of measured hope. The novel acknowledges devastation yet refuses to surrender to cynicism. Its characters rebuild not just homes but identity, guided by language, ceremony, and kinship. This is survival redefined—not by dominance, but by continuity. Readers expecting a high-octane dystopia may find the pacing slow, but that’s part of its grace. Rice reminds us that healing takes time, that the land itself tells stories if we listen closely. The tension comes from the quiet knowledge that the past is never truly gone—it grows, like roots, beneath the soil of every choice. Moon of the Turning Leaves is a novel of endurance and reclamation, told with empathy and restraint. It’s as much about how we live after the end as how we got there in the first place.