100 Books Like Moon of the Turning Leaves

What intrigues me about this book is the way the author, Margaret Atwood, took the (Genesis 30) story of Jacob, who impregnated his wife's handmaiden to produce the children which his wife could not conceive.

She then puts herself in the place of that handmaiden and asks some serious questions. Was that handmaid even given a choice in the matter? What would have happened to her if she had refused? She then rolls the same idea forward 4,000 years to a pseudo religious society in which the sole purpose of handmaidens is to use their bodies to conceive and gestate the next generation for those whom they serve.

I loved this book because I worked in hotels before I became a butler, and the protagonist is a maid. You can walk into many situations in a hotel room, so a murder mystery is no big stretch. I love hotel or rich home dramas, especially if they portray the staff correctly. Domestic staff are generally likable, meticulous, quiet, and honest. This is a really nice, cozy murder mystery.

This book sticks the reader in the middle of a maternity ward in poverty and flu-stricken Dublin circa 1918. I was totally rooting for nurse Julia Powers, an experienced maternity nurse who works long, thankless shifts trying to keep women and their babies alive.

The lack of medicine, staffing, and money is appalling as women enter the hospital to give birth. Yet through empathy, determinism, and quick thinking, Julia, her trainee, and her patients find ways to help each other. It’s a tour de force in female friendship, intelligence, and problem-solving and an indictment of the medical incompetency of male physicians.

It illuminates a cross-section of Dublin citizens struggling with poverty, the Great Flu, and the aftermath of a horrendous war. I found the story moving, gripping, and somehow hopeful.

I love that the main character, journalist Whitney Chase, is not only an unreliable narrator but also unreliable herself. She confesses she has problems with the “creep.” She adds fake information and lies to get more eyeballs on her writing. I was totally engaged in watching Whitney make poor choices and try to wiggle out of her responsibilities and the consequences of her actions.

It’s like being a voyeur to the train wreck of her life. Yet Whitney is funny, hard-working, tough, and a champion of the vulnerable. She is such an incomplete, contradictory, and frustrating character that I was compelled to turn the page to see if she somehow landed on top. 

As Rebecca Roanhorse put it, Indigenous people on Turtle Island have already survived an apocalypse.

So it’s not surprising that my favourite apocalypse novel centres around a remote Anishinaabe community struggling to survive after a distant and never-fully explained calamity. It’s a prescient story, especially in light of real-life catastrophe that arrived only two years after its publication.

Much apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction focuses on gritty bands of survivors, but Rice provides a scenario that is much more in keeping with how communities actually act during disasters, contrasting the acts of care and mutual aid with the haunting slow decay of the world and the threat posed by violent outsiders.

It’s a multilayered, stunningly crafted realist take on how to keep surviving after the world ends.

Not all indigenous languages have a corresponding alphabet or writing system. For example, many North American indigenous languages are now represented in a Romanized alphabet, but traditionally these languages were spoken and the stories they contained were transmitted by oral tradition.

In the case of my Taino ancestors, stories were also told with pictographs or petroglyphs. I conclude my list of indigenous futurist books with stories that are told graphically, in the form of Moonshot, a collection of comics edited, written, and illustrated by indigenous storytellers and artists.

Edited by Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe & Métis) and Michael Sheyahshe (Oklahoma Caddo Nation), the imagery is striking, conjuring colorful mythoscapes and slipstream futures with indigenous people at the forefront, redefining science and technology along the way. One story features a protagonist in a wheelchair, raising questions about ableism in SF and the possibility for “Crip” Futures and Indigenous Futurism to be… show more.

Jim Northrup, Fond du lac Ojibwe author, was my writing mentor from the time I met him in 1991 until he passed away in 2015. He would always ask, “What are you writing today?” That was his way of encouraging me to keep writing. His crime novel, Dirty Copper is the story of Luke Warmwater, who returns to the Reservation after serving in Vietnam. Luke becomes a deputy sheriff on the Rez and sees firsthand the war raging below the appearance of peace.

I would listen to Jim talk about his writing and the progress he was making on his story as he wrote it. Listening to him encouraged me to keep going with my writing. Jim’s way of storytelling through the written word is something I have tried to emulate.

This is a book about stories of the land I live on.

My home is in Winnipeg, on the edge of the flatland called “the Prairies” in Canada and “the Great Plains” in the United States. But the land doesn’t care about the Canada-US border. And that border is nothing but an imposition on the older nations whose territory I live in: the Red River Métis, and the Anishinaabeg.

These Indigenous Peoples have ancient living traditions of oral storytelling, and this book, by Anishinaabeg scholars, celebrates their stories’ spiritual, practical, and political power.

A teaching shared by storyteller Kathleen Delores Westcott tells us “the story is a living being. It’s alive.” That teaching has helped me to understand how stories attract us, get inside us, change, and move across boundaries. 

Simple lyrical illustrations bring this story about commitments to life. A wise grandfather guides his granddaughter on a journey of discovery teaching her about indigenous perspectives. This important book is moving and essential for readers of all ages. It offers authentic historic perspectives and helps to describe the responsibility of truth and reconciliation.

This book gives a nice accounting of American Colonialism and their response to the People who inhabited this country prior to being discovered (sic). I was especially enlightened by the undertaking of explaining the Second Amendment from an understanding of the times and the people. Seeing how the three fears of the times no longer exist.