Moon of the.. Books in Order

The Moon books begin with Moon of the Crusted Snow, where a small northern Anishinaabe community loses power just as winter is settling in. At first the crisis feels confusing more than explosive. Phones stop working, supplies stop coming, and the usual systems people rely on simply fall away. Rice keeps the story close to the community, so the tension grows out of practical things like heat, food, trust, and who can still make good decisions when fear starts to spread.

At the center of the series is Evan Whitesky, a steady, thoughtful man who is not introduced like a larger-than-life hero. He is a husband, a father, and a community member trying to hold things together. Around him are family, friends, elders, local leadership, and eventually people arriving from the south, each bringing different ideas about survival and control. That balance between private responsibility and community duty is one of the big engines of the series.

Winter matters here.

So does place. These books are rooted in northern Ontario, in the bush, on the water, and in the memory of older ways of living on the land. Rice treats Anishinaabe knowledge, ceremony, and language as living parts of daily life, not decorative details. That gives the series a different feel from a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction. The question is not only how to survive disaster, but how to remember who you are while doing it. The tone is often quiet and slow-burning, but that quiet carries a lot of pressure.

Moon of the Turning Leaves picks up more than a decade later and opens the story outward. The people who made it through the first novel have built a more land-based life, but time has created a new problem: resources are thinning, tools are wearing out, and staying put may no longer be enough. Evan joins a scouting party heading south toward their ancestral homeland, and his teenage daughter Nangohns becomes a key part of that journey. The sequel keeps the survival stakes high, but it also becomes a travel story, a search story, and a story about what younger people inherit from the choices of their parents.

This is survival fiction, but it never forgets community.

Across both books, expect tension, hard weather, moral pressure, and a strong sense of how people depend on one another. The series is less interested in flashy apocalypse spectacle than in leadership, kinship, memory, and renewal. If you like post-collapse fiction with real atmosphere, close attention to everyday work, and a perspective shaped by Indigenous history and futurity, these books have a lot to offer. They ask what can be rebuilt after the world breaks, and what was worth holding onto all along.