Review: Luna Station Quarterly Issue 056

Luna Station Quarterly Issue 056 by Jennifer Lyn Parsons
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I subscribe to the print issue of this magazine (yay publishers/editors who still provide print issues!) and while I enjoyed reading it, I don't think this issue was up to the standards of those I have read in the past. The theme of this issue is "horses," with a few unicorns sneaking in. There's nothing wrong with the theme, but I've just read better horse/unicorn stories.

The exceptions are "Horse Girls Til the End," by SK Marre, a horse/kelpie/horror story told entirely through phone text boxes (which must have been a challenge to format); "High To Kolob On a Cosmic Clydesdale," by Katrina Carruth, about a young woman rejecting her mother's religious cult and getting to confront not only her dead mother but her mother's God; and my favorite story in the issue, "Rain Town," by Mary J. Daley. This story contained some interesting worldbuilding that I would love to see expanded further, possibly to book length.

Of the stories I wasn't as fond of, they seemed to have one main problem: the endings. Their endings seemed to fade away without any sense of resolution or coming to a firm stopping place. Also--and this is more of a personal quirk--the formatting took some getting used to. It's set along the lines of online magazines, block paragraphs separated by white space. I would have preferred the traditional print-book indented paragraphs look (seeing that this was an actual print issue).

This isn't a dealbreaker, however. Jennifer Lyn Parsons, the editor, has been publishing this women-identified-authors only magazine for quite a few years, and I am glad it exists. The physical print issue is a lovely thing, and the magazine as a whole is worth supporting.

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