REVIEW: “A Bedtime of Fire, Alchemy, and Ice” by JM Cyrus

Review of JM Cyrus, “A Bedtime of Fire, Alchemy, and Ice,” Luna Station Quarterly 62 (June 2025): 243-258 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Solo parenting a gaggle of young kids while you’ve got experimental research notes you need to write up is never an easy thing — whether or not your research is magical! But Morwedd’s wife is away, so she’s got no choice but to make the balance work.

What I loved most about this story was its portrayal of the sheer *joy* of parenting young children. Yes, under-5s are exhausting and relentless and complicated to parent, especially when there’s more than one of them; but so often it feels like people don’t talk often enough about how much fun it is to be a parent, how joyful it is. So this story just made me happy.

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REVIEW: “Silver and Silt” by Lydia O’Donnell

Review of Lydia O’Donnell, “Silver and Silt,” Luna Station Quarterly 62 (June 2025): 175-184 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I don’t often come across stories featuring male selkies, so that was an interesting novelty in this one. But as with many stories about forbidden love, this one wasn’t really about whether the narrator and her selkie would have their happy ever after, and more about one girl’s path to finding what it is she really wants.

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REVIEW: “In the Orchard, Where Robots Grow” by Erin K. Wagner

Review of Erin K. Wagner, “In the Orchard, Where Robots Grow,” Luna Station Quarterly 62 (June 2025): 53-69 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Death of a parent.

It’s hard to call a post-apocalyptic SF story “cozy,” but as I read this story and reached for the right words, that’s the one I kept ending up with. It’s not “cozy” in the sense of happy and comforting but in the sense of small-scale, intimate, personal, much more about the breakdown of familial relationships than the breakdown of the robot in the orchard.

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REVIEW: “Yes, No, Goodbye” by LeeAnn Perry

Review of LeeAnn Perry, “Yes, No, Goodbye,” Flash Fiction Online 140 (May 2025): 26-28 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Suicidal ideation.

I’m never quite sure what to make of stories like this. It’s a ghost story, well-crafted and constructed, put together in a way that leads to a simple resolution and leaves few questions unanswered. But along the way it concentrates on the sad and the sordid and the unhappy, and whenever I read a story like this, I always wonder — what does the author expect me to get out of a story like this? I think sometimes I wish for a little more escapism from my reading than gritty realism stories like this provide.

(First published in The Dawn Review August 2023.)

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REVIEW: “To Be a Woman is To Be Without a Name” by Chidera Solomon Anikpe

Review of Chidera Solomon Anikpe, “To Be a Woman is To Be Without a Name,” Flash Fiction Online 140 (May 2025): 19-22 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

When FFO serves up one of its rare non-speculative stories, I’m never quite sure what to say. I include the stories on this blog because our commitment to reviewing all stories in a given issue or anthology trumps our focus on speculative fiction; but I sort of feel like I’m not sure what I’m supposed to get out of a non-spec fic short story, so I don’t know how to read it properly.

What I can say is that this somewhat-autobiographical-feeling story has a stark, strong conclusion.

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REVIEW: “Through These Moments, Darkly” by Samantha Murray

Review of Samantha Murray, “Through These Moments, Darkly”, Clarkesworld Issue 223, April (2025): Read Online. Reviewed by Myra Naik.

Reading this story on a cold spring day hits different. The “you” point of view for narration was a choice, and I’m happy to say it made sense for the story. Lovely words throughout – the prose was just as awesome as the plot. An evocative piece of writing.

This story is a hopeful delight.

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REVIEW: “galactic oracle eulogy” by Samir Sirk Morató

Review of Samir Sirk Morató, “galactic oracle eulogy,” Flash Fiction Online 137 (February 2025): 9-12 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

The setting and characters in this story are so unusual and distinctive that I spent quite a bit of my time trying to figure out just who and what everything is. I like the way that so much is left ambiguous (is it fungus? parasites? metaphor? weird aliens? bio-ship or metal-ship? macroscopic or microscopic?), so that I have no confidence at all that my interpretation is accurate, but every confidence that my interpretation is just as valid a way of reading it as anyone else’s.

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