I've been very much looking forward to reading Flowers for the Sea since I first got early access to it through netgalley. It's just right up my alley. I ended up taking a depressingly long time to get to it, but I finally read it. Wow.

This is my first time reading Zin E. Rocklyn. Their writing style is very smooth and poetic. This blend of horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and the stark and brutal realities of past and present weave together perfectly to create a striking little book. Rocklyn's ability to bring out the absolute horror in pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood is profound.

Parts of this were a little hard to follow, but I did eventually settle on reading this through audiobook format. Audiobooks take a lot more effort for me, and while the narrator here was fantastic, I definitely had the thought a couple of times that this was maybe a book I needed to see with my eyes and skim passages over and over to get the most out of. The 30 seconds back button got a ton of play here.

Overall, this is a striking book with a lot of power to it, and I definitely enjoyed the ride. I'll be keeping my eyes out for more from Zin E. Rocklyn, as they're definitely a writer I'm interested in.

Honestly this just speaks to my confusing fear of water and motherhood. It got me into Iraxi's headspace

This book has beautifully written prose, an elegantly unfolding plot, and imaginative world building. I loved it!!

There's a lot I can appreciate about this book, but it just wasn't for me. Things moved too slowly and then too quickly for my tastes given the short length of the book. I found myself wishing for more background info and a more fleshed out world but also kind of wishing the author had done away with the background altogether to give a more compact story of the happenings on the ship. The prose is excellent, and the author conveys some powerful emotions through Irixa, while building some fantastic atmosphere. I would absolutely read more from Rocklyn, even if this one wasn't quite the right fit for me as a reader.

FLOWERS FOR THE SEA - by Zin E. Rocklyn – Science Fiction & Fantasy Short

In a word—Wow!!! To say I love Rocklyn’s writing is a complete understatement!

Here’s a snippet:

‘Seventeen hundred forty-three days at sea. Recollections of a life without the current in our legs are the stuff of fables and faery tales. We trade stories. The babes listen in wonder, having taken their first steps on this cursed boat, their disbelief palpable. Teens brood in mildewed corners, hissing at daylight and orders to earn their keep. The girls bleed late, and we are eternally thankful to the godless depths below.’

‘Survivors from a flooded kingdom struggle alone on an ark. Resources are scant and ravenous beasts circle. Their fangs are sharp.’

‘Among the refugees is Iraxi: ostracized, despised, and a commoner who refused a prince, she’s pregnant with a child that might be more than human. Her fate may be darker and more powerful than she can imagine.’

Thank You, NetGalley and Tor Dot Com (MacMillan Publishing), for providing me with an eARC of FLOWERS FOR THE SEA at the request of an honest review.

The amount of raw and deep-seated emotion packed into this tiny novella is hard to forget. The tale of a woman, mother and refugee, Flowers for the Sea is a wild tale of turmoil on the ocean and the birth of the unknown. Dark and gothic, this is a story to read in a single sitting. Every page is dripping in bleak, heavy atmosphere. Every page offers a nightmarish situation, a grisly setting and unaswerable decisions that must be made.

The tale of Iraxi - a woman pregnant with a child not human and surrounded by monsters on a toiling and rotting ship - is something that will be gone in a second but will last far much longer. Fascinating from beginning to end, this is a debut not to be ignored.

Content warning: realities of birth, generational trauma, vomiting, infant harm and death, body horror, threat of drowning

On an ark escaping from a flooded kingdom, Iraxi is ostracized both on land and at sea, with her pregnancy the only thing keeping her company. Claustrophobic in its intimacy, this story has her narrowly escaped hell only to find herself in a new nightmare of razorfangs and other things that stalk the deep.

The language in this novel is intimate and precise. The location is tight – it takes place entirely on a ship escaping from a drowned world. Outside, there is the danger of literal sea monsters. Inside, there is starvation and distrust, especially as Iraxi seems to be the only one to have successfully gotten pregnant in the last five years. There’s hope in the new birth, but also fear of what comes next from her fellow passengers and rejection as Iraxi questions if she even wants the child altogether. The other characters aren’t much help either, though they definitely explain a lot as to why Iraxi feels the way she does about her predicament, both personally and on a community-level.

The horror found within pulls no punches, with key moments engaging both visual fears as well as audio, making for incredible reading jump scares. Pregnancy is part of the peril here, as is the child that comes of it. There is some body horror in addition to uncomfortable nightmare sequences to depict the before-times. I won’t go more into specifics because it’s best experienced first half, but it is as terrifying as it is awe-inspiring.

Anger simmers and propels the plot forward. Though there is time ticking with the upcoming arrival of the baby, Rocklyn keeps the reader going with hints as to what got Iraxi on this path, why she’s so angry, arriving an ending that tracks perfectly.

Sad to say, but I think this one was just too esoteric for me. Maybe I wasn't in the right headspace when I read it, but I had a hard time following the story. I do wonder if that could've been fixed through fleshing out the story more into a full novel rather than keeping it so short.

Flowers for the Sea is a twisty dark novella with sharp eldritch-like horror imagery. It is a short quick read and I don't think I could put it into words if I tried. This novella hooked me from the start with its sharp and surreal descriptions and eerie prose. I highly recommend this one and I will definitely be rereading it in the future.

This was an interesting and fast read. It is something you have to process after reading, as when you finish, you will be all, "what did i just read."

Flowers for the Sea is a unique and beautiful horror tale that will stay in your mind for all of your days. Rocklyn has chosen to use such particular forces as the tools of horror that you will find yourself wide-eyed, gripping your seat with a growing pit in your stomach.

I wanted to like this book, and I did--on a theoretical level. Horror and fury, Black women learning their power? Sign me up. But the actual experience of reading left a lot to be desired. The prose is a bit overwrought for my taste--I find horror more effective when people just state terrifying facts rather than embellishing them, but that's just me. What really got me was the lack of desire. Kurt Vonnegut once said "Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water." Well, Iraxi doesn't even seem to want water. Or revenge. Or anything.

It's fine for characters to lack agency; here, it's actually kind of the point. Iraxi is trapped on a ship with people who mean her harm. Her agency is terrifyingly constrained. No, the issue here is the lack of wanting. Iraxi doesn't seem to want anything, not even the destruction of the ship or of her tormentors.

I can see an argument for how deprivation and abuse cause a lack of desire, but in a narrative it destroys all the forward motion. Iraxi is waiting for the birth of her child, but she doesn't really want the child, and when the child is born, she's both terrified of it and disgusted by it. And sure, postpartum depression is real, but again: Iraxi doesn't even seem to _want_ to do anything about it. The horror of the pregnancy and birth just sits there, with her and with us, while mostly just time drives the plot forward.

I really wanted Iraxi's power (and wants) to bloom because of her connection to her own history or her own self. Instead, a lot of the climax focuses on her child and her child's father. They are the ones with the power. They are the ones who bring change. Iraxi, while she does discover some powers of her own, is ultimately more of a vessel for these forces, and that felt like an uncomfortable conclusion to draw. Iraxi's final lines claiming her power felt hollow and unearned, because she didn't seem to be the focus of what was happening. I wanted a story about Iraxi, but this felt more like a story about the things that happened to Iraxi. I still don't have a good sense of who she was. This book had good/scary scenes but ultimately the narrative fell short.

TITLE: Flowers for the Sea
AUTHOR: Zin E. Rocklyn
112 pages, TorDotCom Publishing, ISBN 9781250804037 (paperback, also available in e-book and audio)

DESCRIPTION: (from the publisher): We are a people who do not forget.

Survivors from a flooded kingdom struggle alone on an ark. Resources are scant, and ravenous beasts circle. Their fangs are sharp.

Among the refugees is Iraxi: ostracized, despised, and a commoner who refused a prince, she’s pregnant with a child that might be more than human. Her fate may be darker and more powerful than she can imagine.

MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

MY THOUGHTS: Zin E. Rocklyn’s debut is a stellar entry into the cosmic horror genre, a novella that leaves you unsettled and feeling small in the face of the universe even while you admire the tenacity of the main character.

Cosmic (or “Lovecraftian”) horror tends to be expansive and claustrophobic at the same time. The greater cosmos makes itself known to humans who are overwhelmed by it, usually in places that are tight and dark with odd architecture or geometry at play. Setting the action on a boat alone at sea certainly ticks those boxes off but limiting most of the action to the few places on the vessel that the outcast, disdained Iraxi is allowed to visit makes the book feel even more claustrophobic. There is no sense of a larger, supportive community that might normally feature in a lost-at-sea adventure. The desperation of 1743 days at sea, with no land in sight, is palpable. Rocklyn infuses the book with so many visceral sensory details: the sweat and grime on Iraxi and the people she interacts with, the pervasive salt water, the smells of food and humans. Most notably, there are the physical details of Iraxi giving birth to her possibly inhuman (or more than human) child: bloody, painful, brutal – words which also describe the novel’s one detailed sex scene.

It is implied that Iraxi has been pregnant for most of the voyage, or at least far longer than would be natural. While other women have died, or have survived with the baby dying instead, she has labored on waiting to deliver this child. The rest of the denizens of the ship’s society know something is not right, but not what. Iraxi does as well, and throughout the book she explores her past, analyzing what led her here. She knows what her decisions have cost her and those she loves, but she is also resolutely not ashamed to be who she is regardless of how the people around her (including current and former lovers) think.

At times the novella feels post-apocalyptic, at times like a completely separate fantasy world. Massive flooding (rising sea levels?) forced these people into their current situation, and it’s clear they are the poor, the unwanted, the exiled (in Iraxi’s case); they are cast out by soldiers of the prince Iraxi denied. This also, to me, makes the book feel a bit like a slave ship narrative. While there are no richer (whiter?) overseers on the ship, no destination in sight at which the human cargo will be sold, there is also no sense that signing onto the trip was really voluntary, that those on the ship might find a safe harbor to land in.

And then of course, there’s the cosmic horrors that eventually manifest, deadly and disturbing. I won’t spoil anything about their arrival and effect on the characters, but they are nightmare-inducing.

Flowers for the Sea is a truly stellar debut for a writer I cannot wait to read more from.

NOTE: I received an advance reading copy from TorDotCom Publishing via NetGalley well in advance of the book’s publication date in exchange for an honest review. This review is obviously long overdue.

Thought this was a terrific post-apocalyptic horror read. It was refreshing to read prose that was so vivid and poetic in an era where more and more horror writers can seem like they're writing movie scripts. The sheer amount of trauma the main character goes through can be overwhelming, so I would definitely curate carefully and let readers know, but not a reason to hold back on its promotion.

Holy crap! When I read that this novella had horror elements, I couldn't believe it. I assumed it was just a fantasy. How wrong I was.

This story was so beautiful and yet so harrowing. The main character, Iraxi, is stuck on an arc with people who are dying. She is an an outcast among them, but within their belly lies their hope and her misery. The ship reeks of desperation and as every day passes, the feeling becomes all the more overwhelming as the minutes tick away to Iraxi's child's birth.

I found myself wondering why there was so much desperation? Why the sorrow? And by the end, though not all questions are answered, the horror of it all makes sense. I would have loved to continue reading about this world, and hope the author chooses to continue it in the future.

Netgalley provided a copy of this story for me to review.

One of our DNFs for 2021, just didn't peak our interest enough to keep going. Wanted to be interested more, but with such a wide array of horror novels hitting shelves in 2021 others had to take priority.

I love Zin E. Rocklyn’s short fiction, and I looked forward to her novella for months before it was released. I was absolutely not disappointed. In the story, Iraxi is pregnant, one of the few successful pregnancies of a people who live aboard an ark, fleeing the flooding of their homeland. But Iraxi doesn’t fit in among the refugees; her own people were reviled long before the flooding, and now Iraxi is treated with both contempt and hope, because she might bear a future for the people. Iraxi is no glowing pregnant woman. Everything about her condition makes her miserable, and everything about her current life, living in a decaying boat among a dying people who hate her, remind her of the life and family she lost. When Iraxi begins to see visions of sea monsters, it’s easy to question whether she’s a reliable narrator—and that uncertainty about Iraxi’s perspective is unsettling in all the right ways.

The book is a short 112 pages, but each page is packed with glorious description in gorgeous prose. Rocklyn’s poetic language doesn’t distance the reader from the horrors, both realistic and magical, that she describes, and the story is not for the faint of heart. But this story of anger is also one of transformation, and of survival, made haunting by its dreamlike telling.

4.5 stars. My last read of 2021 was a solid cosmic horror and I am so glad this is how I ended the year with reading. Solid pick. Review to come.

I'm not certain why I originally requested this on Netgalley, because it is very much not my thing. It's set on an ark, in a world where water has swallowed the land, and the main character is pregnant when others on board have all lost babies, died in childbirth, etc. Slowly, we get some details about the world before the ark, while it becomes obvious that it's no ordinary pregnancy.

It's a very visceral book, ripe with details about scents (most of them awful) and sensations (again, most of them awful). Much of it is body horror, which is extra specially not my thing.

It's beautifully written, which is most of what kept me turning the pages. I sometimes felt that the dreamlike narrative got in the way of me understanding quite what was happening -- mostly in the memory sections, and in the relationships between the characters. It probably didn't help that it was so very much not my thing, as well: I can't say I was paying my best attention to the details while cringing!

I will admit I have absolutely no idea what I just read. There were little moments of body horror (love), a creepy baby-that's-not-a-baby, some freaky monsters (that aren't really explained).

I think I wanted a bit more about why they were on the ship and where they were going. Was this an end of the world scenario with a flood of biblical proportions? They seemed to have some technology but we didn't do enough exploring to gage just how much. And how long had they been there? I felt like I was missing all of the details that would make the situation feel real.

And the side characters made very little sense to me. A healer who's never seen a wound before? A big man who may or may not be in charge? A fallen prince? Maybe? But everyone hates the MC for no discernable reason?

This has the bones of a very good and very interesting story - though I'll admit it felt like the most interesting part was just about to begin right where the novella ended - but there wasn't enough detail to really fill it out.