REVIEW: “Maiasaura Deifaeria” by Jennifer Lee Rossman

Review of Jennifer Lee Rossman, “Maiasaura Deifaeria,” Luna Station Quarterly 50 (2022): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Even dinosaurs deserve to have a fairy godmother (or so Rossman easily makes the reader believe); but what happens to the fairy godmother when all her species go extinct? Well, after sixty-five million years of grieving, she finds someone else to godmother.

With a lot of extremely dubious and humorous fantasy and just enough real history throne in to make me jump over to wikipedia, this is a story that feels like it shouldn’t have worked; and yet I’m not convinced it didn’t.

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REVIEW: “Daybreak” by Margrét Helgadóttir

Review of Margrét Helgadóttir, “Daybreak,” Luna Station Quarterly 20 (2014): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Death by gunshot.

Gry is a healer and a descendent of healers, trained in performing the Operation that makes her patients become “Protected”, safe from the unstable emotions that are caused by the weakness and fragility of their bodies. She has never doubted the benefit or efficacy of her training, or the Protection, until she receives a call to Steinknausen, an isolated town in the north. There, she makes a terrible discovery, which threatens to destroy her entire understanding of who she is and what she does.

There is a lot of woo and homeopathy (and a lot of Capital Letters) in this story, and I wasn’t quite sure whether the author was taking these things seriously or trying to poke fun at them. It bothered me at first, but eventually I got swept up by the story.

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REVIEW: “The Girl Who Can’t Say No” by Stephanie A. Craig

Review of Stephanie A. Craig, “The Girl Who Can’t Say No,” Luna Station Quarterly 20 (2014): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

If you, like me, read the title and thought “horror story”, you would not be wrong. What you might not have counted on (as I did not) was that this story would be straight of genie-in-the-bottle fairy tale, except set in space. A fun clash of genres and tropes!

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REVIEW: “The Face Thief” by Torah Cottrill

Review of Torah Cottrill, “The Face Thief,” Luna Station Quarterly 20 (2014): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Fasel Inohiye lives on the tourist planet of Cornucopia and provides “personal services” to those who visit. It’s a pretty good job, bringing in decent money — and when he’s accosted in an alley after a well-paying night, his first thought is that he’s going to be mugged for his money. Instead, it was his face that the thief was seeking.

The rest of the story was about Fasel’s attempt to find someone to help him get his face back, and with good economy of words Cottrill managed to draw a couple of really sympathetic and engaging characters. A well put together story, that I enjoyed a lot.

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REVIEW: “A Sky Without Smoke” by Jocelyn Koehler

Review of Jocelyn Koehler, “A Sky Without Smoke,” Luna Station Quarterly 20 (2014): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Steven and his brother Kevin live in Williamsburg, not far from the spaceport that sends regular rockets to Mars with all the luxuries that could only be obtained on earth. This story traces two days in their lives, and it is a beautiful mixture of the mundane — daily life, brotherhood, rivalries — and the momentous — when their life shifts and nothing is as it was before.

Really enjoyable!

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REVIEW: “On the Anniversary of Your Passing” by Thomas K. Carpenter

Review of Thomas K. Carpenter, “On the Anniversary of Your Passing,” Flash Fiction Online 103 (April 2022): 17-20 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I won’t give away too much of the story if I quibble with its title: Instead of “anniversary”, it should be “anniversaries“. This not-quite-a-time-travel story hinted at complexities that are never quite explained, but the ending is satisfying enough that I didn’t really care about the unanswered questions I had.

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REVIEW: “Eclectibles” by K. Hartless

Review of K. Hartless, “Eclectibles,” Luna Station Quarterly 49 (2022): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

When the story started, I thought this was going to be something I’d really enjoy; but it ended up being a bit too moralising, about the virtues of reading vs. the vices of screens, which I found both irritating and a bit ironic considering that I was reading this story in an electronically published journal, on my screen! And then Hartless chose J.K. Rowling as an example of an author that should always be kept on hand — “So many everyday ailments can be solved with a dose of Potter.” In 2022, it’s no longer a neutral choice to pick a noteworthy transphobe. In the end, I was pretty profoundly disappointed to see such a story printed in LSQ, which normally is extremely reliable in the quality and satisfaction of its stories.

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