REVIEW: “Joinery” by Jennifer Lyn Parsons

Review of Jennifer Lyn Parsons, “Joinery”, Luna Station Quarterly 36 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This entire issue of Luna Station Quarterly is filled with strong, confident, older women, which has made the entire collection of stories a joy to read. Regine, in Parsons’ “Joinery”, is no exception. I loved the care and dedication with which she approached not only her woodworking but also the other people who lived on the same technologically-backward planet, Diot. When an unexpected stranger arrived in her isolated village, Regine is wary but not suspicious. Grannie Hella knows more than she lets on, and lets on that she knows too much. She also brings with her more than Regine could ever imagine.

I love when a story sucks me into all its layers, and hints at all number of layers that can’t be reached in the course of a single short story but which are clearly there, touched on here and there. Who are the Bright Ones? What is their curse, and can it ever be broken? Why does Grannie Hella come to Regine? All these questions swirl around — some are answered, others, painfully, are not — and the end result is a story that’s both bittersweet and hopeful.

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REVIEW: “A Handful of Mud” by Artyv K

Review of Artyv K, “A Handful of Mud”, Luna Station Quarterly 36 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

What can you do with a handful of mud? That’s what Dana and her sister Mtra ask their mipaati, their grandmother, when she brings home not food, not chocolate, but a handful of mud. Mipaati is a hoarder, and at first her granddaughters think this is just another part of her irrational behavior. But mipaati has a plan for her mud, one that Dana thinks cannot possibly work: She is going to grow food in it.

See, Dana, Mtra, and mipaati all live underground; it’s not entirely clear why, but hints are dropped — capitalism, poisoned soil in the land above, a land destroyed by industrialist greed. But it’s not just that it’s hard to grow plants underground that makes Dana think this cannot possibly work; it’s all the restrictions against hazardous, toxic materials that govern their underground compound. If anyone finds out what mipaati is doing, they are all in trouble…

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REVIEW: “Cry Sanctuary” by Anna Catalano

Review of Anna Catalano, “Cry Sanctuary”, Luna Station Quarterly 36 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content warning: Domestic violence, alcoholism, death in childbirth.

Tuppy has been trapped in her marriage to Josiah for more than twenty years, for more than half of it she’s been trying to figure out how to escape. Tonight is her night, if only she can get out of the house without waking him, out of the house and to the bus stop.

After that, she doesn’t know what next, can’t even think beyond the first step to freedom. What she finds at the bus stop is nothing she could ever have planned on, but her silent cry for sanctuary was heard and listened to.

Despite the (relatively) optimistic note that things started off moving towards, this was a hard, harsh story. The route to the ending is not a happy one, and the ending, while victorious, is also not happy. But there is something hopeful about the story of one woman’s escape from violence, and the way in which it sets the scene for her to help others escape.

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REVIEW: “Death’s Armchair By the Sea” by Mariah Montoya

Review of Mariah Montoya, “Death’s Armchair by the Sea”, Luna Station Quarterly 36 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Whatever I might have expected of this story, given it’s title, I certainly didn’t get it, and got a lot of other things instead. A scabrous female death with fleshy hair. Myths about pigs. (Very strange myths about pigs.) Death’s runners, comma, instructions how to become one. Conferences of old ladies’ armchairs.

I also didn’t expect such a lovely, powerful story giving an entirely new mythos of death and rebirth. Deeply satisfying.

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REVIEW: “The Last Evening at Prosperity” by Stuti Telidevara

Review of Stuti Telidevara, “The Last Evening at Prosperity”, Luna Station Quarterly 36 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

The opening scene brings us into the scented, steamy confines of a bathhouse, on a special night where the bathhouse workers become the customers instead. The feel is very much old, luxurious, haremlike. But this feel is offset by hints and bits dropped here and there, about the Prosperity process, about a company rich enough to buy an entire jungle, that make the story feel modern, maybe even futuristic, and this tension provides a great sense of unease while reading. Just what is this place? And what is going on?

I really enjoyed reading this story, which immersed me in its setting with rich detail appealing to all the senses, and kept me guessing all the way to the end. I’d love to read more by Telidevara.

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REVIEW: “Down Among the Fireweed” by Sarah McGill

Review of Sarah McGill, “Down Among the Fireweed”, Luna Station Quarterly 36 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This story of Jack, born to a mother who could not care for him and so made a compact with Tom Scratch, an exchange of her child’s future for his life, and of Marjorie Hart, the only one who could remove the chains that bound Jack, is told in a “forsoothly” sort of voice to enhance its old-fashioned, old-world, old-timey feel. At times this works for me, while at other times it simply ends up either over-written (too many words for too little feeling or action) or under-written (leaving me uncertain what just happened).

The story is quite complex, so having the narrative style interfere with it, as it did for me, meant I got to the end still unsure quite how it hung together, and wishing that I had understood it better. This might be one to reread.

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REVIEW: “Bog Witch” by Maya Dworsky

Review of Maya Dworsky, “Bog Witch”, Luna Station Quarterly 36 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

In the opening paragraphs we are introduced to Taterra, who joined the Lioness Project in her sixties and who is careful to remind herself that she chose to be here on “this horrible backwards moon”. With quick, skilful sentences Dworsky fills us in on Taterra’s character and background, and by the time she drops the line “Taterra was not his girl. She was not anyone’s girl; Taterra had tenure”, I am utterly sold. Taterra might not be anyone’s girl, but I’m totally Taterra’s girl. (Later on I find out she likes Argentinian malbecs, and I am further convinced that Taterra is who I want to be when I grow up.)

Taterra’s assignment on Hecate III, an old prison moon, isn’t exactly first-contact, but it is “first-in-a-long-time contact”, and Taterra is there to observe and gather data, as any good anthropologist and social scientist would. But of course she cannot only observe, and the way in which Taterra gets sucked into the court life on Hecate III, how her guise as mystic and seer shapes and changes the future of the royal family and the entire colony, how her prophesies come true, is gripping and fascinating. It’s not just a story of science and magic, it’s a story of how wanting something can make it happen, how belief in magic creates magic itself, and how the birth of a girl-prince can change everything. I loved it.

One warning for those who wish to avoid it: The story features underage marriage, and death in childbirth.

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REVIEW: “Crone, Chronos” by Cathrin Hagey

Review of Cathrin Hagey, “Crone, Chronos”, Luna Station Quarterly 36 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

“Your kid’s weird!” Lilianna’s mother is told, and Lilianna knows it’s true: She is weird. But her weirdness is nothing compared to the weirdness of finding a cottage near an old ravine where previously there had been no cottage — and finding inside the cottage someone who knows her name. And not only does the old woman who greets her know her name, she knows a lot more about Lilianna than she should, and a lot more than she lets on.

Despite the uncertainty of Lilianna’s fate, as she questions the rationality of accepting an invitation into a stranger’s house simply on the promise of ice cream, this is a simple, straightforward story, wearing its genre (time-travel) on its sleeve in such a way that you know what the resolution is long before it is reached.

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REVIEW: “Phalium arium ssp. anam” by Victoria Sandbrook

Review of Victoria Sandbrook, “Phalium arium ssp. anam”, Luna Station Quarterly 35 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Nora Sullivan, “the strange one”, will take any justification she can to go see the sideshow, even if it means accompanying John Reidy (“a nice young man from a nice family”, for all that he seems uninterested in the company of the woman he invited to come with him). Much of what is at the show are disappointing fakes, but some…some of them were real, and magic, and crying out to Nora to be rescued.

This rather quick and quiet story reminded me of Mommy Fortuna’s Carnival in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. But here, things end hopefully, rather than in chaos.

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