REVIEW: “Her Beautiful Body” by Adrienne Celt

Review of Adrienne Celt, “Her Beautiful Body”, Strange Horizons 5 Feb. 2018: Read online. Reviewed by Danielle Maurer.

This is one of those stories that makes you go “hmmm.”

The premise is simple enough. A woman’s body is being featured as a museum exhibit, and you are invited to experience the exhibit. The narrator is your tour guide, pointing out interesting features of her body, as well as commenting on the “activists” who are angry about the exhibit.

On the one hand, wow. What a metaphor for the objectification of women. This is literally a woman reduced only to the value of her body; the guide summarily dismisses the mind, saying that the body “could [not] possibly be improved by something so intangible and distant as consciousness.” The activists who focus on her life, on the things less physical that made her a person, are also dismissed by the narrator. Instead, we are left only with her body as an object to study and worship.

On the other hand, there’s something oddly beautiful and accepting in the description of the woman’s body. She is not perfect, but rather perfect in her imperfection. She has blemishes. And, as the guide states, “there are stories in her beautiful body.” This is true of anyone’s body, and there’s an almost empowering message there for women, who are so often judged by how closely their body meets society’s standard for perfection.

I’m really not sure how to feel about “Her Beautiful Body,” but perhaps that’s the point. It made me think and feel, and that’s some of the highest praise I can give to a story.

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REVIEW: “Cardinal Skin” by Bo Balder

Review of Bo Balder, “Cardinal Skin”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 5-17 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The opening story of Galuschak and Cornell’s anthology dumps us immediately into an empty plain of glass, across which Teio and her brother and father are skating to reach the mountains on the other side, the mountains on top of which

they hoped to find the sanctum where the Cardinal Skins were hidden. Many heroes had tried to acquire a Skin, trying to save the world from its ruined state after the Cataclysms.

Teio’s mother, Haio, had been such a hero, but she had failed. Now her family come, hoping both to succeed where she had not, and to find her body and bury it.

The story has all the elements of a classic quest tale, but it is more than that: It is a ghost story. It is a story of family bonds and family places. It is a story of learning that everything you knew is wrong, and a story of a place that is not quite as abandoned as everyone thought.

Balder’s writing was quick paced and precise. An unfortunate quirk of typesetting marred the story throughout, however. In a number of places, quoted material coming after another sentence lacks the space after the preceding period, meaning the quotation marks end up curled the wrong way.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Obscura” by Yoon Ha Lee

Review of Yoon Ha Lee, “Obscura”, Strange Horizons 29 Jan. 2018: Read online. Reviewed by Danielle Maurer.

There are plenty of stories floating around the world about Faustian bargains and cursed objects. The trope is commonly associated with musicians and artists. So it’s no surprise that in “Obscura,” as the name would suggest, the object in question is a camera which takes pictures of absences.

The fourteen-year-old narrator (it’s never definitively established whether the narrator is male or female,) meets a strange man with a stranger camera, and the stranger ends up bequeathing the camera to the narrator after warning the narrator not to use it on people for fear of what it might show. Humans aren’t so great at resisting temptation, however.

The story showcases Lee’s gift for words. The sentences are rarely long or flowery, but there’s a power in the bluntness, in a single, precise sentence of description. The camera itself is fascinating, as are the brother and sister who bring it into the narrator’s life. However, I found myself a little confused at what, exactly, the camera’s powers were. In a novella or novel, there would be more time to learn by osmosis, but here I would have loved a slightly clearer explanation.

That said, the story is still captivating. It draws you in easily, hooks you just as the narrator is hooked, and its climax and denouement are equally memorable. Well worth a read.

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REVIEW: “The Glow-in-the-Dark Girls” by Senaa Ahmad

Review of Senaa Ahmad, “The Glow-in-the-Dark Girls”, Strange Horizons 15 Jan. 2018: Read online. Reviewed by Danielle Maurer.

What if the U.S. hadn’t just developed nuclear bombs, unthinking, cold machines capable of obliterating cities? What if they had also developed people who were capable of the same devastation?

That’s the premise behind Senaa Ahmad’s “The Glow-in-the-Dark Girls.” The narrator, an unnamed member of the eponymous group, is a girl from a poor neighborhood who volunteered to become an experiment. She and her sisters are walking bombs, capable of setting themselves on fire, of detonating and destroying a city. But humans aren’t meant to take that much radiation, and so not only are they prisoners of a sort – they’re also dying.

Ahmad does an excellent job of characterizing these women, of showing how the shifting political winds and the havoc they wreak affects them. She unfolds their collective emotional distress through the slow death of Nabeela, once their most glorious sister, featured on talk shows and interviews. Are they victims? Are they criminals? Ahmad never comes down strongly on either side, perhaps because there is no easy answer. They have killed so many, but they also chose this life because they thought it was their best option.

Ahmad’s prose draws the reader in as she unspools the story of these women, and her descriptions of the fires are evocative and powerful. “The Glow-in-the-Dark Girls” is a story that will stay with you after you read it.

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REVIEW: “Ghost Marriage” by P. Djèlí Clark

Review of P. Djèlí Clark “Ghost Marriage”, Apex Magazine 105 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Ayen is wandering the desert, exiled because of her husband, who has been wreaking chaos and death ever since he died She just wants to unbind herself from his restless spirit so that she can return home and live her life in peace. From this unsettling start, the story unfolds with slavers, a witch, a penitent bull, and forgotten gods in order to tell a story about a young woman finding her own way and her own strength.

It’s nice to see a story that incorporates multiple African cultures, instead of homogenizing the heritage of an entire continent for purposes of fantasy. I’m not sufficiently informed to say how well each was handled (I’m pretty sure they were all based on cultures that exist in our world, as I recognized the Himba from Okorafor’s Binti trilogy at one point), but I enjoyed seeing the attempt.

This is not a particularly short story, coming in at almost 12,000 words, which gives it plenty of space for twists and turns. This story has more scope than most short stories (possibly because it is a novellette), so we get to follow Ayen on a real journey. That being said, be sure to set aside enough time to enjoy it and not feel rushed. It’s certainly worth the time!

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REVIEW: Abandoned Places edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell

Review of George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell, eds., Abandoned Places, (Shohola Press, 2018) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This anthology is the inaugural publication of newly launched “Purveyors of Fine Genre Fiction”, Shohola Press, and what a fine way to launch it is.

This is a collection of stories about places which are “forgotten but not gone,” of “the lonely, the rejected, and the uninhabited” (to quote the back of the book). Some of the stories are classics, written by greats such as Poe and Bradbury. But many more of them are new tales, by a variety of contemporary writers both familiar and new. In the editor’s introduction they say that “we especially wanted to introduce audiences to strong voices who haven’t yet received the widespread distribution they deserve”. Since one of the reasons I was motivated to start SFFReviews was so that I could broaden my reading horizons and learn about new authors (whether actually new or merely new to me), I was incredibly excited to receive a review copy of this beautiful book.

Below is the table of contents, and the review for each story will be linked from here as it is published:

In his introduction, Cornell says that “If you discover at least one new writer who speaks to you in these pages, we have accomplished our goal, dear reader.” I discovered not one, but many. The collection is well balanced and every individual piece is stellar. Even the ones not entirely to my taste left me glad to have read them.

Sara L. Uckelman23 Comments

REVIEW: “Work, and Ye Shall Eat” by Walker McKnight

Review of Walker McKnight “Work, and Ye Shall Eat”, Apex Magazine 105 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

The story opens three months into an unknown apocalyptic situation. All we know is that the staff of a colonial re-enactment village have been walled in with two layers of electric fencing, and they have no idea why. Is is a virus? An alien invasion? They are told simply to plan for the future, which Karen, their general manager helps them to do, getting the tradespeople to teach the actors and salespeople useful skills and making sure they plant enough food to survive the winter.

This is the calmest apocalypse I’ve read about, which makes the slow-growing menace all the more powerful. Karen becomes an increasingly unreliable narrator as she struggles to keep her people inside the walls, but it remains satisfying to read, because it’s so believable, so normal. In the end, I don’t really know what happened, except that it isn’t good. I’m not normally a huge fan of ambiguity, but in this case I think it works.

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REVIEW: “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” by Alix E. Harrow

Review of Alix E. Harrow “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies”, Apex Magazine 105 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

It turns out that most librarians are secretly witches. They can smell what kind of book you need, and intuit the size of your fine from the slope of your shoulders. Our narrator isn’t just a witch and a librarian: she’s someone who cares about her patrons. So when a black teenage boy comes in with waves of yearning billowing off him, she does everything she can to help. But how far will she go?

The whimsical premise caught my attention, but the emotional depth captured my heart. Why do we read? To fill holes in our souls, obviously. To escape from circumstances that have become unbearable. I’ve always been a proponent of the holy power of escape, so I was tickled to see this story directly challenging those who look down upon it.

This story is about more than just the power of reading (I know: there’s nothing “just” about the power of reading, but bear with me). It’s also about rules, and when to break them. The narrator shows us how to do it, too: with joy and conviction. She knows that the consequences are worth it – not just for the sake of the kid she’s helping, but for her own sake, as well.

Highly recommended for anybody interested in the healing power of stories.

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REVIEW: “Origin Story” by T. Kingfisher

Review of T. Kingfisher “Origin Story”, Apex Magazine 104 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

This is a remarkably beautiful story, for one so gruesome. But I think that is at least half the point – there is grace in the blood and the guts, as in everything else, and when you start a story that reads “[t]he last of the fairies worked in a charnel house,” then you have no right to expect something different.

Of course, the fairy doesn’t just do the work the foreman asks of her; she does her own work, as well. After the human employees go home, she uses the scraps of meat and bone and skin to make her own creatures. Mostly, they are small monsters, and are not the subject of this story. No, this story is about her greatest creation.

The fairy in question is explicitly not a good fairy, but I don’t think she is evil, either. Just dark. Different. Her creations are described as frightening, but not harmful. And in this story, she is motivated by a desire for justice. Her actions are not pretty, but they come from a sense of rightness and a desire to bring some justice to one who she perceives died unfairly.

Whether writing as T. Kingfisher or under her own name, Ursula Vernon has a way of combining the magic of fairy tales with an earthy practicality. It shouldn’t surprise me that she could take a story rife with death and fill it with life and the spice of good humor, but somehow, it does. Like fairy magic, her voice transforms what sound like a deeply disturbing tale into something dark but not at all heavy.

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REVIEW: “Words Never Lost” by DaVaun Sanders

Review of DaVaun Sanders, “Words Never Lost”, Podcastle: 504 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

This is a very hard story to review because it feels like it balances uneasily on a knife-edge of how the marginalized identities and their historic experiences are presented, and I don’t share either of the identities in question so I feel completely unqualified to judge whether the balance is successful.

Imala is a bi-racial (Black and Apache) student in a reservation school of the later 19th century who is trying to retain/learn her mother’s language and heritage in the face of the (historically accurate) efforts of the school to erase them. At a crucial confrontation with the school officials, her long-missing father appears leading a company of Buffalo Soldiers (Black regiment in the U.S. Cavalry) who need the assistance of an Apache translator. But both the soldiers and the reason for the translator are not at all what they seem.

Imala takes up the challenge but finds herself impossibly torn between being true to both her heritages, especially in the face of the possibility of losing her father all over again. Both the situation she is put in and the solution she finds are brutal and disturbing, even though she has agency over the choice.

The aspects that made me uneasy were how the set-up of the worldbuilding pitted the Black and Native American characters in hostile opposition to each other (whereas the evil White characters seemed more cardboard background) and the way Imala’s solution (and the background build-up to it) gives the appearance of privileging written language over speech in the context of preserving culture. It was a solution that made sense within the specific constraints set up in the story, but the historic background of attempts to preserve and retain Native American language communities undermine the story’s semi-hopeful outcome.

Several content warnings including racism, threat of rape, murder, and self-mutilation.

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