REVIEW: “Mama Tulu” by Jessica Guess

Review of Jessica Guess, “Mama Tulu”, Luna Station Quarterly 27 (2016): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content warning: Drinking, gambling, domestic abuse.

This urban fantasy set in Jamaica centers around the titular character Mama Tulu, and Sasha, the young woman who goes to visit her to make an unspeakable request. I liked almost everything about it — but not quite everything. I have a deep ambivalence about the use of phonetic representations of dialect in written fiction; I am never sure how appropriate or successful they are. Reading them often feels like an uncomfortable caricature; but on the other hand, I think it’s important to recognise the varieties of ways in which people speak, and to recognise the legitimacy of, e.g., AAVE.

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REVIEW: “The Dragon’s Dinner” by Lindsey Duncan

Review of Lindsey Duncan, “The Dragon’s Dinner”, Luna Station Quarterly 27 (2016): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

There was a lot of cliches in this story — the dragon-fighting knights trying to win the hand of a princess; the princess who didn’t want to be an object of conquest; the maiden aunt who provided the princess with the training needed — but ultimately, this was a fairy tale, and fairy tales are cliches, so it worked.

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REVIEW: “The Old Hotel” by Nicole Janeway

Review of Nicole Janeway, “The Old Hotel”, Luna Station Quarterly 27 (2016): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This reads like a series of beautiful vignettes — words carefully painting pictures for the mind’s eye — rather than a story with characters to be invested in, events to be concerned about, outcomes to celebrate.

But it is short, and it is pretty, so I can’t fault it too much.

(Originally published in Scarlet Leaf Review, 2016.)

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REVIEW: “Mory Takes Flight” by Anna O’Brien

Review of Anna O’Brien, “Mory Takes Flight”, Luna Station Quarterly 27 (2016): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I struggled a bit with the balance between background information and actual story in this one; it sometimes felt like there was more of the former and less of the latter. But I enjoyed the chatty oriole from England who was just passing through Cyrpus when he met up with the titular Mory; he was amusing and jolly to read.

(First published in Unlocked: Short Stories from the Frederick Writers’ Salon, 2015).

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REVIEW: “Halfway Through the Dark” by Alexis Ames

Review of Alexis Ames, “Halfway Through the Dark”, Luna Station Quarterly 43 (2020): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This was a wonderfully cosy steampunk mystery, which I enjoyed a lot. The characters felt rich and familiar, as if this was but one episode in a series of stories. I’m now interested to see if Ames has written about Kate and David before, or if she’ll write about them again in the future!

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REVIEW: “Assyrian Machinery” by Anne Elise Brinich

Review of Anne Elise Brinich, “Assyrian Machinery”, Luna Station Quarterly 43 (2020): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

The setting of the story in ancient Assyria appealed to me from the start (I have a fondness for the ancient Near East, and I once did some intensive research on ancient Babylon for a story of my own, and I could tell, while reading this, that Brinich has done a similar amount of research, as I recognised a lot of the telltale details), but the story itself was what impressed me: Characters I cared about from the first paragraph, moments that pierced my soul, two threads of building/making and family/sisterhood entwined together in a beautiful manner, and sharp, sudden, unexpected ending. This was another first-rate publication in this month’s LSQ.

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REVIEW: “Giant Beach” by Amy Porter

Review of Amy Porter, “Giant Beach”, Luna Station Quarterly 43 (2020): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Oh, this was a lovely story! As global warming increases, and more and more icebergs melt, the remains of a long-extinct species come to light, parts of their bodies washing upon the shores of Iceland. One day, an eye, whole and perfectly preserved for so many millennia, washes up — and “After weeks of nothing in my life mattering”, the narrator tells us, “suddenly something did”. The story of their journey to the giant beach, and their experience of looking into the giant’s eye, is both tender and intimate; Porter’s beautiful writing makes it feel like we’re there beside the narrator, watching without intruding. Beautifully crafted.

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REVIEW: “Vó Úrsula’s Magical Shop for Soul-Aches” by Victoria V.

Review of Victoria V., “Vó Úrsula’s Magical Shop for Soul-Aches”, Luna Station Quarterly 43 (2020): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This issue of LSQ is full of good titles — intriguing ones that draw me in and seem to tell almost as much of a story as the story itself — and this is another one of them.

The titular shop is the backdrop for the lives of cousins Benjamin and Berenice dos Santos — students at the local university involved in all the usual student activities, geometry, activism, surreptitious publication in the free press. The story is a mixture of otherworldly-fantasy (the world they live in could be any world, not ours) and descriptions (such as “The government had promised to fight crime, but much of the violence and fear that haunted the cities came from the so-called law enforcement, as well.”) that feel very much like pointed comments on our own current society.

And I’m also a sucker for the first shy blushes of a queer romance, so thumbs up from me for this story! I would totally read a longer/novel-length story based on these characters.

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REVIEW: “The Space Beyond Cubicle Twenty-Nine” by Chelsea Sutton

Review of Chelsea Sutton, “The Space Beyond Cubicle Twenty-Nine”, Luna Station Quarterly 43 (2020): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This story was a fun mixture of time travel and space exploration. About two years ago from the present day was when humans were first visited by Humans, our own race from the future, come back to the here and now to rescue humanity from a dying earth, so that one day Humanity might still exist. All that humans need to do is follow the Humans — taking flight from earth and heading into space.

Sutton’s recounting of what had happened over the last two years, told through the experiences of Lucy who works at Earth Interface Publishing, was fun and engaging, and full of likeable characters.

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