Amazon Affiliate Link | Bookshop.org Affiliate Link This review contains spoilers. The Soft Landing Collection by Jacquelynn Lyon includes five pieces of short sapphic SFF fiction. Three are fantasy and two are science fiction. My favorite story was the first one, "The Glass Window", about a mermaid in a zoo of magical creatures, who finds herself irrepressibly drawn to a creature in another tank. The ending was just such a beautiful cuddly and sweet relief! I also have to give a lot of credit to "We Deserve a Soft Landing, Love", about astronauts in space, despite the fact that it gutted me like a fish. For some reason I had thought from the book title that the entire collection would have happy endings and this one did not. Despite that, I can definitely recognize the quality of the work and it is now my go-to rec when anyone is asking for sad f/f, despite its short length. The personal details and easy, instant chemistry, even though someone was doomed (which I did not know), drew me in.
"Little Lights" is about penpals in a futuristic Earth where some people live in a floating city and some on the surface. If epistolary slow-burn f/f with a payoff is your jam, this is where you'll find it. "The Bog Hag" and "Flower Crown" are both fairytale-flavored fantasy of the princesses and queens and castles variety, with creative plots.
As far as writing style, I found the stories easy to read and process and the worldbuilding, which was different in each one, simple enough to grasp without a lot of decoding.
Shira Glassman is the author of Knit One Girl Two and the fluffy wlw fantasy series nicknamed The Mangoverse
