REVIEW: “The Meadow” by Dina Lyuber

Review of Dina Lyuber, “The Meadow,” Luna Station Quarterly 22 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Jaydren lives in a world that feels very much like a version of what our own future could be like: Technology at every turn, that links us to our social media, our entertainment, or transportation. All of his actions are directed at or built around things these. Lyuber did a good job of taking our current technology the next few steps down the line; what was less successful was the way this was integrated into the story, as I often felt like the story was the vehicle for the cataloguing of the technology, rather than the other way around.

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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: “Empire of Dirt” by K B Sluss

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

Content note: Reference to self-harm.

In its simplest description, this is a story of unrequited love — ugly and chaotic. It was a tough read: Characters whom you wanted to sympathize with became increasingly unsympathetic, and the hurt and anger and betrayal that is woven through everyone’s story was hard to handle sometimes. Sluss shows real mastery in writing this piece.

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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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REVIEW: “Exalted Guests (Or, How Malka Raised a Dybbuk Army)” by Rena Rossner

Review of Rena Rossner, “Exalted Guests (Or, How Malka Raised a Dybbuk Army),” Luna Station Quarterly 23 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

LSQ over the years has been one of my most reliable sources of Jewish speculative fiction, and Rossner’s story of young Malka leaving her family’s Sukkot celebration to the village cemetary, only to find herself calling out “the kabbalistic incantations she was supposed to only hear, not speak” and speaking in languages she does not know to call up the dead, is another tick in that box. It’s a wild, frenzied story, leaving the reader uncertain whether the dybbuk army is a blessing or a scourge.

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REVIEW: “Ingebjorg Unspelled” by Jessamy Dalton

Review of Jessamy Dalton, “Ingebjorg Unspelled,” Luna Station Quarterly 23 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Oh, I absolutely loved this story. Ingebjorg is the daughter of the king of the Northlands, taking after her boisterous, raw-boned father rather than her cultivated, educated mother. Her character comes through in the very first lines of the story and it is engaging and distinctive. Dalton paints her relationship to her parents, and her parents relationship with each other, with great deftness; every word rings true, every one is sympathetic. It’s hard not to feel for Fridesweide, who has to grow old and grey and fretful that she will lose everything her husband has loved in her; it’s not hard to understand how Ingebjorg can love her mother but get along better with her the further they are apart; it’s extremely easy to feel the same revulsion for Klovass the alchemy professor that Ingebjorg feels. And when a Delphic oracle is cast upon Ingebjorg’s life, I could not wait to see how it would resolve itself. I just really enjoyed reading this.

(First published in Lorelei Signal 2011.)

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