Moon of the Turning Leaves, by Waubgeshig Rice

Sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow, in which a remote Anishinaabe community survives an apocalypse.

Twelve years after the first book, the community realizes that the place they've settled in is too small to sustain them. The lake is getting overfished, and the game is getting wary. They decide to send an expedition to look into whether they can resettle in their original home, in the Great Lakes area. The last expedition they sent never came back, but Evan Whitesky, his now teenage daughter Nangohns, and several others decide to take the chance...

I liked this even more than the first book, and I liked the first book a lot. It's one of my absolute favorite genres, "cozy apocalypse but with stakes." A lot of the book is about life and how it's lived now, with tons of details about how to preserve a plastic fishing net and how to dress a deer, how to name a baby and how to create a consensus, how to fight and how to live. The various communities feel very real, and the relationship of Evan and Nangohns is lovely.

It has a very satisfying ending but I really hope Rice writes more books in this setting and creates a whole saga.

Content notes: violence, one instance of rape threats, racist slurs, all in the context of the group encountering some white supremacists.