Flowers for the Sea

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARc for review through Netgalley.)

“‘Naiem,’ Iraxi,” he says, voice even smaller. “I meant no harm nor insult.”
“What does it mean?” My words collide into one another. I am drunk on affection and I feel foolish. Yet I cannot move. My desire to wanes as the bath continues to warm. My eyelids droop, but I find the strength to keep them mostly open.
“It means ‘mother to all,’ Iraxi.”
But it isn’t Borim who answers. It is the being he is holding.

***

Then why am I here? I think angrily. Why did you save me? Why are you keeping me alive?
At this, the being does something like a smirk, and I shudder.
“It is not you, naiem, but your anger that is destined for so much more.”

***

It's show more been four moons since Iraxi and her fellow villagers boarded an ark, their lands overtaken by the rising floodwaters - and the mysterious, tentacled creatures who dwell therein.

Among the refugees, Iraxi is an outcast; her father and grandmother "communed with the unpredictable tides," a talent that bred both fear and jealousy amongst her neighbors. When Iraxi refused to marry a spoiled prince, thus uniting two neighboring kingdoms, her parents and siblings paid the ultimate price. Now she is alone, shunned, destined for a burial at sea herself - if not for the life that grows inside her. In a world where children are few and far between, Iraxi may hold the key to saving (or perhaps destroying) humanity.

FLOWERS FOR THE SEA is a deliciously horrifying tale: one of climate change and evolution, pregnancy and childbirth (holy body horror, Batman!), and monsters that creep along the ocean floor and swoop, open-mouthed, from the clouds (with a generous sprinkle of the "Humans Are the Real Monsters" trope for good measure).

Rocklyn's unveiling happens at a leisurely pace - tantalizingly so - and I spent so much time trying to figure out what was going on that I think a second read-through might be in order, just to scavenge for any morsels that I might have missed. It's a weird tale, to be sure, but also disquieting given the way it's anchored in our current reality (i.e., the world is burning and instead of taxing the eff out of billionaires we're letting them go to "space").

I'm 100% on board with the comparisons to Octavia E. Butler, but the first comp that pops into my head is THE DEEP by Rivers Solomon. Come to think of it, I don't see any reason why the two stories can't exist in the same 'verse... show less

I'm enjoying recent motivation to dig into the absolute pile of Tor novellas I've accumulated over the years, but I should warn you that Zin Rocklyn's Flowers For the Sea might not be for everyone and is quite different from my usual read.

The first page features a content warning for birth horror and violence against children, so that might give you an idea.

Essentially, this is a pregnancy horror story wrapped in the understandable anger of victims of racial violence, in which the main character starts out as frankly suicidal and goes from there.

If you can handle some bleakness and gore, it's also a remarkable read, but you have to push through to the end to really grab hold of the narrative and even then, don't go looking for easy show more answers. As with Jamaica Kincaid and similar writers, Rocklyn is uninterested in coddling the reader but rewards the persistent with a satisfying, if still bleak, ending. Reminiscent of Rivers Solomon, Kai Ashante Wilson, and other writers who are reckoning sharply with the legacy of racism in their fantasy, Rocklyn's short book is worth the read if you can stomach it and probably even if you can't. show less

I speak of this as if it were instantaneous. Gods-like in its swift retribution for our foul existence. But it wasn’t. It was achingly slow, deliberate. Hubris could not shield us from the sun’s heat, from the boldness of below-surface creatures caressing the innocent flesh of our curious young ones. We were the finest coastal traders of the continent. Sea-battling vessels, fish, fruit, and labour were our currency. We were hardbacked and hardworking. We were proud. And now we are dying.

Flowers for the Sea was a story of grief, anger, and how those two emotions not only change us but carry on to our children. Set in a fantasy, horror, scifi world in which climate change has forced them to take to the sea, Iraxi has been surviving on show more this ship for 1,743 days. Told all from Iraxi's point-of-view, readers are brought in as she's pregnant, surviving through the pregnancy longer than anyone else has. She doesn't seem happy about it and as we view this world through her lens, it's cloaked in her disdain for the people she's surviving with, the filthiness of not being able to properly wash, and the ever present fear.

My sister and I shared quarters the size of my room on the ship. Back then, I’d complained of suffocation. Now, I choke on the emptiness.

While in the present we're seeing Iraxi's life on the ship, she does think back, with some flashbacks, to how life has lead her to this moment. We learn that they are from a coastal village and that Iraxi was propositioned by a prince but she refused him because she was in love with someone else. This lead to her family being murdered in a house fire and the people of the ship having resentment for her not joining with the prince and therefore their villages combining, thinking that could have saved them somehow from having to abandon to the ship to escape the encroaching water. The anger and grief Iraxi feels from her family's murder is palpable, I mean the line “Now, I choke on the emptiness.” is a gut punch.

The child giggles. And I scream.

At a little over a hundred pages, the story moves fairly quickly and while we get some background, Iraxi starts giving birth pretty quickly in. The author doesn't shy away from bringing us in and describing the pain of birth and with an added scifi element, it's gritty. Iraxi passes on her anger to her child and through that child, Iraxi gets some of her revenge. Look, on a good day, I'm mildly disturbed by children, so this baby was capital H-orror to me.

Fire refused me. And so, I surrender to the sea.

I was impressed with how in such a short page count, we got all the dynamics of the important relationships, the background to understand the world and Iraxi, and all the fantasy, scifi, and horror elements. There was so much to explore here, Iraxi's phoenix emerging, climate change ramifications, fear, survival, and generational trauma, all told through a grief and anger coloring that was sharp toothed and guttural. I haven't even mentioned the appearance of mermaid like creatures, so yeah, there's that, too.
Recommended if you can handle gut churning poetry. show less

Flowers for the Sea is not an easy read--the story itself, the prose, and the progression all make for a journey that a reader must embrace and travel through in a fashion that (at least for this reader) might well involve working for meaning as well as cringing away from some of those very same meanings. And yet, this is a gorgeous book worth appreciating in all its facets, and I'm glad to have read it, just as I'll be glad to pick up anything else Rocklyn writes.

The power of this tale is so timely, the immediacy of the content is almost crushing if you allow yourself to think about it. In many ways, I felt "seen" by this book in a way that I've rarely, if ever, experienced when the topic of pregnancy comes up, and the pure focus show more Rocklyn brings to bear on the protagonist's situation here is as artful as it is terrifying from moment to moment. If this book had been a novel, I'm actually not sure I could have made it through the tale, but as a novella, the length and focus on topic are just enough to be painful without being too much. I will say that there's some backstory and drama which clutters up the story a bit more than I think might have been necessary, but then again, since it also gives some breadth to the story and gives the reader a break from the immediacy of the present moment we're focused on, I can see it was included.

All told, this is a fantastic book, and a short, powerful read with gorgeous prose. It won't be for everyone--I'm still not sure whether I enjoyed it so much as appreciated it, myself--but at the same time, I can't wait to pick up Rocklyn's next book. show less

I'm really surprised this has as low of a rating as it does. If I were still into rating books I'd give this at least 4.something.
Anyway, I really liked this book. I wouldn't mind hearing more about what happens next, yet I was also satisfied with the ending-- I didn't need more, but I wanted more. Not something you always get from a story.
This was weird and wild. Set in a falling-apart ship adrift in a post-apocalypse this story was just as claustrophia-inducing as its setting. Just enough body horror to ratchet up the intensity, just enough (and the right kind) of world-building to feel its realness without it being explained. (I don't mind a good info dump once in a while but there's no room for it in a novella). The pace was sharp show more and even the dream sequences (something I usually dread) didn't bog it down. They actually felt like dreams the MC would drift into. (side note: how often have I read a dream scene that has no connection to how dreams actually work and is just some weird thing the author throws in? 40? 42? A higher number?)
And the author stuck the landing! It didn't just whimper out. It ended. And it was good.
This review isn't as good as the one I wrote in my head before I got to my computer. I'm just as sad about that as you are. show less

When the land got submerged under the waves of the seas, people moved to boats. This story starts on one of those boats, where Iraxi is heavily pregnant - and everyone hopes that this will be the first child to be born after years on the waves and all other newborns being lost. But for her the story started a lot earlier - she belongs to a family which was persecuted and killed off for being able to talk to the sea, she was once asked for by a prince and she saw the destruction of her world long before the world of everyone else ended.

And she dreams - sometimes with open eyes, sometimes while sleeping - about the past and about sea monsters. Because in this world the seas and the air contains literal monsters - some being visible by show more everyone and some seemingly hiding.

There is nothing beautiful in living on a boat for years - everyone is dirty and everyone's mind may not be exactly as sharp as it started. But the baby seems to give everyone hope. Iraxi, knowing more than others, being able to see more than others, is not sure. And birth in primitive conditions is never fun - even when the child is normal.

It is unclear how much of what Iraxi sees is reality and how much is feverish dreams. It can be read either way in some places I think. The end is almost expected (although the fact that some people made it to the end surprised me a bit). There seems to be connection to some African myths, Iraxi is often described as being very dark skinned and there is something akin to magic happening towards the end of the novella. The very end is as decisive as it is completing a circle. Plus some of the dreams sounded almost Lovecraftian.

I don't enjoy horror as much as I enjoy the rest of the speculative genres and this novella was getting a bit too close to where I usually draw my lines. But it worked out at the end. It won't make my list of best novellas of the year but it is readable and it may work even better for someone who enjoys that type of stories more than I usually do. show less

*Flowers for the Sea* is a short novella, and I’m always impressed by how much story authors can pack into such a small number of pages. The writing here is beautiful and poetic, and the atmosphere is strange, creative, and unsettling in an intentional way.

That said, I struggled with how fluidly the story moves between reality, memory, and dreamlike moments. The transitions were so seamless that I often felt disoriented and had a hard time following what was actually happening. Because of that, this novella took me longer to read than I expected, despite its short length.

I can absolutely appreciate the ambition and the eerie, imaginative world the author created, and the narration and prose were beautifully done. However, while I show more admired it more than I enjoyed it, the story itself didn’t fully connect with me the way I hoped it would. show less