#sffbookclub

I found this a very satisfying continuation and conclusion of the story started in Moon of the Crusted Snow. It has a very different mood and focus, so much so that in this review I'm trying to avoid spoilers for the previous book more than for this one. Where Crusted Snow gets a lot of its tension from us as readers learning things as the protagonists do, this one is mostly not a suspenseful story. The broad outline of how things have to go is apparent from early on, and most of what makes it interesting is atmosphere and character development. Even the cover art of the two books does a pretty good job of communicating their relative moods.

I'm pretty sure this book would stand alone far better than most sequels do, because it largely follows a character too young to remember the events of or background to the first book. This neatly gives Rice a way to work in some rehashing naturally as people answering her questions, but also this book fills in a lot of information that none of the characters knew during the first one. That said, I'd still recommend reading Crusted Snow first because the most emotional parts of this story are bound to have more impact if you've had longer to get invested in the older characters.

CWs: racist violence, and this one's a real tear jerker.

#SFFBookClub (we read the first one as part of the book club last year)

There's an excellent book in here. An engaging story about individual and collective self-delusion and amnesia, with some very clear political messages and a grim humour to it. But at times, especially in the second quarter or so of the book, the author seems unclear whether he's writing a novel or a NY Review Of Books essay about individual dementia, collective amnesia, and the selective remembering of nostalgia. It's clear that he could write a fine essay and I'd enjoy reading that too, but the hybrid is clunky. From the POV of a novel reader the essay portions make the plot drag slowly enough that I started to lose interest. From the POV of a creative nonfiction reader, the actually fiction parts are jarring and confusing.

#SFFBookClub

#SFFBookClub read for August 2025.

This is not a book I think I would have picked out for myself outside of the book club, but I found it to be a surprisingly good read. It was a little hard to see the overall picture at first due to each chapter occurring with completely different characters and situations. It made it difficult to track when you would see the names of previous characters brought up in later chapters.

Everything kind of came together in the end and for me, and even the disjointed stories made sense. For me, at least. I'm not sure if this is one that I would regularly recommend to others due to the overall vibes. I don't know a lot of people that really enjoy Japanese dystopian stories with this structure.

I found this to be enjoyable, but it jumped around between the genres too much for my liking.

It really irked me that the MC never gets named. It was at least bearable due to the perspective being almost entirely from her point of view, but with how much she interacts with the other characters, it drove me a little bonkers that she was never called by any name.

I'm glad that I read this still, but it's not one that I'm ever going to have an interest in revisiting.

#SFFBookClub May 2025

Possession is an sf story about a future earth with changed climate and melting permafrost, where the narrator works with an African pouched rat to find bodies infested with mind controlling fungus before it can spread further.

I really enjoyed this story's optimism about dealing with monsters and strangeness with compassion even through fear. I also liked the narrator talking about their OCD, and how that was weaved into both why they were doing their job and also as a source of empathy.

For me, I think this is an especially nice counterpoint to several other recent stories (about intelligent fungus!) that ended with a much different destructive tone. (cc #SFFBookClub)