Rating: 7.0/10.
[WARNING: SPOILERS!]
A short post-apocalyptic novel set in an Ojibwe reservation in Northern Ontario, far from any big towns. The book starts with the power going out and the supply trucks no longer arrive. Only a few people know how to hunt and trap for food, the rest must subsist on a cache of canned food. Two students attending college in a town to the south manage to escape on snowmobiles, and they describe the chaos in the town as people fight for food and nobody knows what the problem is.
A bit after, a white guy arrives in a truck, looking to join the community. He has survival skills so the community reluctantly accepts him in. He is assertive and ends up dominating the community, while everyone else is passive and don’t come up with much of a plan, except for slowly consuming their fuel and canned food supply. He eventually dies in a shootout near the end of the novel.
The book ends without much conclusion, they still don’t have any idea how to survive and we still don’t know what happened that caused the collapse. The author’s intended message was the resilience of aboriginal communities, but I got the opposite impression how the Ojibwe community lost their traditional way-of-life and helplessly wait for handouts, and are so passive that a white guy single-handedly dominates them all.
