Review of Liv DeSimone, “Dragons Over Cefalù,” Luna Station Quarterly 59 (2024): 143-165 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Content note: Violence against women.
I struggled with what to put in the content note for this story, because it’s more than sexual harassment (what I initially had), but not quite sexual assault (what I toyed with). Whatever it is, it pervades the opening pages of the story so if that isn’t something for you, definitely avoid this story. The harassment feels like it isn’t that awful, because it isn’t quite assault, but the low-levelness of it ends up making it even worse, because as a reader, as a woman, I kept finding myself trying to normalize it, and that made it all the more awful. In the end, a quote from the story gave me what I needed: “After all, none of this had ever been about sex” (p. 162). It’s not about sex, it’s about violence, and power.
Normally I’m not a fan of using violence against women as a means of moving plot forward in a story, but there was something about this that worked. Two women’s separate revenges become intertwined,
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