REVIEW: “For Love and Country” by Yelena Crane

Review of Yelena Crane, “For Love and Country,” Luna Station Quarterly 63 (September 2025): 145-159 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This is fundamentally a story about being an immigrant in a dystopia, and as such it was a tough story to read (I’m an immigrant myself, but the so-called “good kind” which makes where I live only slightly less dystopian than it is for my fellow immigrants who are the “wrong kind”), but just as Eva snatches at a chance of hope, of asylum, so too I found my own hope in the story, hope that everything would turn out all right, hope that Eva would get her happy ending, hope that the author wouldn’t betray us readers by pulling the rug out from under us at the last moment, growing tentatively as I read. The balm of having the hope fulfilled was something I needed today, an otherwise tough day.

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REVIEW: “Going to Sea, Mother,” by Luscha Makortoff

Review of Luscha Makortoff, “Going to Sea, Mother,” Luna Station Quarterly 63 (September 2025): 37-49 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Suicidal ideation.

Selkie stories tend to be more difficult to pull off than stories of other mythical creatures, in part because the mythology of the selkie is so constraining: There is one dominant narrative, and I find many authors struggle to escape it. Makortoff managed to add extra layers to the typical selkie story, intertwining it with another story of desertion and loss, in a way which I ended up enjoying quite a bit.

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REVIEW: “Self-Portrait as ChatGPT” by Sarah Chin

Review of Sarah Chin, “Self-Portrait as ChatGPT,” Luna Station Quarterly 63 (September 2025): 286-290 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: References to suicide.

I can teach you how to say “I’m sorry” so someone believes it. I can make you sound like you mean it, even when you don’t (p. 289).

This was a beautiful, somewhat heartbreaking story, which was even more interesting to read given that I had read a few days earlier this Guardian piece on chatfishing. It’s becoming harder and harder to imagine a future where significant portions of the population are not outsourcing a significant portion of their human interactions to a machine, and that’s both scary and sad.

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REVIEW: “To Breach a Citadel” by Jeannie Marschall

Review of Jeannie Marschall, “To Breach a Citadel,” Flash Fiction Online 145 (October 2025): 7-9 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This story didn’t quite work for me. It had the traditional horror-story’s build-up to a spooky, creepy ending, but maybe I missed something, but I didn’t get what was supposed to be scary about the denouement. Ordinarily, this would be an indication that I need to read a story a second time, in case I did miss something, but without something, some hook, some lovely language, some character that grabbed me, it doesn’t feel like this would be a worthwhile use of my time.

No story works for every reader; this one simply isn’t one for me.

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REVIEW: “This is What Mouths Are For” by Parker M. O’Neill

Review of Parker M. O’Neill, “This is What Mouths Are For,” Flash Fiction Online 145 (October 2025): 24-26 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

There are four mouths in this story — Guiltymouth, Anxiousmouth, Bittermouth, and Haughtymouth. All four mouths do what you’d expect mouths to do, and what I love about horror as a genre is how it provides space for the ordinary, everyday to twist into the macabre. O’Neill pulls this off excellently: About four paragraphs before the end I suddenly went “oh god,” as I figured how it was all going to end.

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REVIEW: “The Forest Through the Teas” by Wendy Nikel

Review of Wendy Nikel, “The Forest Through the Teas,” Flash Fiction Online 144 (September 2025): 34-36 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I loved the pun in the title, it made me excited as a hint about what was to come. Sadly (at least for me and my tastes), what was to come involved a whole lot more, rather heavy-handed, botanical vocabulary, not all quite as punny as the title. It made me sad, because it detracted enough from my enjoyment that I never quite got into the story itself, which I think I might have otherwise enjoyed.

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REVIEW: “The Things You Bought for the Robot” by Stefan Alcalá Slater

Review of Stefan Alcalá Slater, “The Things You Bought for the Robot,” Flash Fiction Online 144 (September 2025): 30-33 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

What makes a person a person? What makes a robot a person? With all the philosophy I’ve studied and taught, I’ve never found a better answer than that there is nothing more to being a person than being treated as one — an answer that works for humans or robots, and an answer that is worked out in this satisfying little story.

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