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: “The Ravens’ Sister” by Natalia Theodoridou

Review of Natalia Theodoridou, “The Ravens’ Sister”, Podcastle: 508 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

Oh. Oh my.

I don’t want anyone to get the impression that the best way to get me to like a story is to rip my heart out of my chest with your bare hands. I’m just saying that it’s been known to work on occasion.

“The Ravens’ Sister” riffs off the fairy tale motif of the seven brothers who are enchanted as birds and the sister who has to save them. But there are some fates you can’t save people from. Key quote: “Were my brothers men when they went to war? Had they always had the hearts of birds?” The story is told in several versions, but the core story is the same: seven brothers go off to war in what is clearly some part of the horrors that the former Yugoslavia dissolved into. They return to their father changed, and their sister is tasked with a quest to change them back. In a fairy tale, she would have spun shirts from nettles or kept mute silence under persecution. Here she encounters several celestial beings who either help or hinder her, each taking its toll on her body. It is always the sister’s fate to sacrifice herself for her brothers’ sake. She never even questions it.

In one version of the story, the brothers return as literal birds, in another they return heroes, in the last as traitors. But in all cases, the war has changed them and they will never be whole again. The language is powerful and poetic and ugly. Be in a good place when you listen to this story. It will damage you.

The one structural thing that I disliked (and this is a general thing that I’ve touched on before) is that there is a framing structure of numbered verses, sometimes with as little as a single sentence in each verse. The narration included giving the verse numbers, which I found intrusive. Each spoken number jolted me sideways from the flow of the story. In my (highly subjective) opinion, the narration would have been more effective simply with a pause between verses, leaving the numbers in the written text but unspoken. They work visually–the eye slides over them as it does over the verse numbers in a Biblical text. But in audio that particular aspect just didn’t work for me. The story worked, but not that detail.

(Originally published in Kenyon Review Online)

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REVIEW: “The Gilded Swan” by Damon L. Wakes

Review of Damon L. Wakes, “The Gilded Swan”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 357-359. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The opening line “Once upon a time” never fails to exercise its power to thrill over me. I love fairy tales. I love the way those words tap into my entire reading history, and allow the story to draw upon decades of internalized expectations. I love the familiarity of fairy tales that is rooted in those expectations. I love it when my expectations are satisfied, when every aspect of the story could have been found in any of the classic fairy tales.

But what I love even more is when those expectations are dashed, and happily ever after turns horribly ever after. This was a delightfully satisfying little fairy horror tale.

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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: “There are No Wrong Answers” by LaShawn M. Wanak

Review of LaShawn M. Wanak, “There are No Wrong Answers”, Podcastle: 505 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

Sometimes a story doesn’t hit my sweet spot, not through any lack of writing quality, but simply because the structure is one that grates on me. “There are No Wrong Answers” was one of those (suggesting, perhaps, that there are wrong answers) due to the use of the interruptive quiz format that framed and was interspersed with the main narrative. Kudos for the experimental attempt, but it doesn’t work for me personally.

Lana has a talent for designing and analyzing personality tests, her neighbor Madame D (a drag performer and fortune teller) is a talented cold reader. Their intersection over a straying Labrador retriever results in an awkwardly developing friendship as Lana gets prickly over Madame D’s suggestion that their occupations have more in common that she’d like to think. Lana gets hired as lead test administrator for an employment counseling firm, which leads to the major conflict in the story.

The overall shape of the story is an overlay of “protagonist is aided to greater understanding of herself and learns to appreciate people she originally looked down on” and “supernatural powers achieve justice for wrongs done.” The genuine supernatural elements would seem to undermine the original premise that psychological counseling and cold reading are twins of the same parentage, but without them, this wouldn’t be a fantasy story at all.

(Originally published in What Fates Impose edited by Nayad A. Monroe)

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REVIEW: “The Rocket Farmer” by Julie C. Day

Review of Julie C. Day, “The Rocket Farmer”, Podcastle: 507 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

What raises a story above simply being entertaining to being a “good story” is often the layering in of multiple themes or meanings. On its surface, “The Rocket Farmer” is a fantasy about rocket ships as an agricultural crop: their natural history, the complexities of crop management, the inevitable tragedies of failure. But on a different level, the story concerns the more mundane and eternal struggle of one generation to understand and communicate with another. Sarnai is pulled between the bottomless pit of neediness that is her father’s struggling rocket farm, and the growing suspicion that she has failed to protect her daughter from the lure of the family profession.

The story is told in three voices: Sarnai, her daughter Sophie, and one of the rockets, waiting to fulfil its destiny. The result is a delightfully unexpected and–dare I say heartwarming?–tale of communication failures and eventual success. If the story had focused only on the clever conceit of rocket farming, it would have fallen flat for me, mired in a vast array of technical detail. But as a medium for a story of human interactions, it worked beyond any of my initial expectations.

(Originally published in Interzone #271)

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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: “Penumbra” by Chris Brecheen

Review of Chris Brecheen, “Penumbra”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 168-177. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Brecheen’s story is urban fantasy, set in San Francisco, as we can tell from references to BART stations and other familiar aspects of the city. It’s a first-person story, and unlike many first-person stories which start off with a bunch of introspective maundering, here we were immediately introduced both to the personality quirks of the narrator (rather bitter and a bit sarcastic) and of the people the narrator interacts with, such as Dr. Cienica, who “pays lots of attention to how dirty her glasses are whenever she lies” (168).

I really enjoyed Brecheen’s use of language; there were turns of phrase every paragraph or so that made me smile. If you read for enjoyment, then this is a good story for you. If you read for a creepy feeling of displacement, and the sense that the setting of the story is shifted from our own reality by only a fraction, then this is also a story for you. It doesn’t take much imagination to wonder what it would take for people to be able to see the Penumbra here, in our own world.

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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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REVIEW: “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Under the Still Waters” by N.K. Jemisin

Review of N.K. Jemisin, “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Under the Still Waters”, Podcastle: 503 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

(Note: This is a re-issue of PodCastle 154 originally broadcast in 2011 and first published in Postscripts.)

Once again, Podcastle has a perfect combination of a poetically lyrical story with a strong sense of place, narrated by a voice that brings that place and person to vivid life. There are stories that are well-narrated and then there are stories that I can’t imagine consuming by any means but the specific aural performance through which I came to them, because that performance gives them a life above text on the page. Needless to say, this is one of the latter.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Tookie encounters several strange creatures that complicate his survival and efforts to help others in the flood waters. What really struck me about this story structure is how much of a hero’s-quest story it is. The “ordinary” young man is thrust into taking a champion’s role via encounter with a supernatural creature who may or may not be a force for good. (The eventual answer is “it’s more complicated than good and evil.”) At the end, he emerges with a deeper understanding of himself and a mission to help save the world, or at least his part of it.

But that’s just the symbolic structure. What makes this story great is the immersive voice and language, the way descriptions of everyday surroundings slide easily into the fantastic, and the way the folklore of cities and peoples is woven into a new mythos. This joins my list of favorite Podcastle episodes.

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