Review: Flowers for the Sea

Flowers for the Sea by Zin E. Rocklyn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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 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.

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