REVIEW: “A Guide for Lost Sailors” by Allison Har-Zvi

Review of Allison Har-Zvi, “A Guide for Lost Sailors,” Luna Station Quarterly 21 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I’ve discovered that I love stories told by the figureheads of ships — this is not the first such one in LSQ that I’ve reviewed! So once I realised that that’s what the narrator of this story was, I settled in for a good time.

And I mostly got it; I say mostly because there is a small part of me that feels sad and let down when in stories even wooden women are subjected to misogyny. The “it’s only in fun” excuse doesn’t — pardon the pun — hold any water.

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REVIEW: “Minotaur” by R.S. Bohn

Review of R.S. Bohn, “Minotaur,” Luna Station Quarterly 21 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This was a lovely mixture of modern archaeology and ancient myth, with an added layer of depth that comes from the fact Noani, the lead archaeologist on the dig, is facing the realisation that she is likely dying, of the same cancer that took her mother and her aunt. There was a deep aching sadness that grew and grew throughout the story; it was extremely finely crafted.

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REVIEW: “Bits & Pieces” by Tina Shelton

Review of Tina Shelton, “Bits & Pieces,” Luna Station Quarterly 22 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Systemic misogyny; racial stereotypes.

Heelee is a member of the Chiaxxa Bia, the one all-woman warrior caste that devotes its life to the defense of the people against smugglers and other raiders. Despite a life bend on killing and destruction, she one day saves the life of an innocent baby, and in return is exiled by the Chiaxxa Bia. In the end, a man comes in and rescues her, and takes her away to a new life.

I was a bit disappointed in this story, mostly because it reinforced the trope of a “strong woman character” being one who fights, who kicks and bites, who is feared. There is a place for women like that, but if that’s the only notion of “strong woman” that a story contains, I always come away a bit sad. It also felt weighed down by all the worldbuilding, which had to be established before the story itself could even begin. It just didn’t work for me.

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REVIEW: “Planet, Paper, Space” by Melissa Embry

Review of Melissa Embry, “Planet, Paper, Space,” Luna Station Quarterly 22 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Max Villafranca is an origami artist who has paid for two weeks’ visit to the orbiting station Gaia, where he is very much the bumbling tourist that the long-suffering crew puts up with because it pays the bill. This was such an utterly charming mixture of the strange and unfamiliar and the ordinary, almost mundane. Max was an extremely disarming hero, and I felt great sympathy for Captain Nguyen having to put up with him. And I loved the way in which this story was slightly more than science fiction, it also had a fantastical element that segued always into horro that I was not expecting.

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REVIEW: “The Flower of Karabakh” by Anne Jennings

Review of Anne Jennings, “Empire of Dirt,” Luna Station Quarterly 22 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I found this story confusing; it was arranged into short scenes, and by the time I was five scenes in, I had to keep pausing to go backwards and forwards to determine whether the narrative character had changed, or whether the temporal location had changed, and I could never quite tell. Taken at face value, this is the story of a imprisoned 90yo, the daughter of an Azerbaijani carpet maker, who reminisces in prison about how they “read a book in my twenties about a fantasy world magically hidden in the knots and patterns of an oriental rug”, which sparked their fascination with carpets — why then, when the narrator has grown up among carpets from her birth? Why also does the narrator speak of arriving in Baku as an adult as if Azerbaijan is a foreign, unfamiliar company? (And how does the child of an Azerbaijani carpetmaker meet and become friends with a woman from Singapore in the 1940s [I’m guessing, based on the fact the narrator is 90 and her father was alive in 1921]?). By this point, I’ve even forgotten to wonder why the narrator is in prison in the first place!

Some of these questions get sorted out, but not all, and not until much later on; unfortunately, I spent too much time being uncertain of what was going on to be able to enjoy this story as much as I would have liked.

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REVIEW: “Sowing Rubies for Brides (Or the Graveyard at the Edge of Faeryland)” by Suzanne J. Willis

Review of Suzanne J. Willis, “Sowing Rubies for Brides (Or the Graveyard at the Edge of Faeryland),” Luna Station Quarterly 23 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

There was a lot of world-building stuffed into this story; so much so, I almost didn’t see the story itself at times. The story itself is rather gruesome, laced with misogyny, full of murder and the hunting of faery brides. At the end of the massacre of the faeries that happened when Tirra was just a girl, an agreement was made between the human world and the faery world “for faery brides to be reborn from dead fae” and this agreement “had been the only chance at mending the wounds between this world and Faeryland” — but the piece that I was missing is why would Faeryland ever want to mend those wounds that had been inflicted upon them, unprompted and premeditated? If I were a faery and this had happened to my people, I would have had nothing to do with humans ever again: A man’s loneliness is never an excuse to kill someone.

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