Zin E. Rocklyn’s debut, whether it’s your type of book or not, is an unforgettable one. It’s the story of Iraxi, a pregnant refugee who is as ostracized from those around her as she is furious at her own situation. It’s difficult to describe this book without giving anything away, but it’s a beautifully written portrait of maternal rage and revenge, full of eldritch horrors and gruesome descriptions, and it accomplishes quite a lot in its short length. Anyone looking for a strange and vicious read should look no further, and I’m keen to see where Rocklyn takes us next. (And if you have the option to listen to the audiobook, I’d highly recommend it!)

Happy pub day to Flowers for the Sea! Iraxi is stuck on a ship with survivors of her sunken world.
With Awful living conditions inside and deadly beasts outside, it’s a difficult life. Iraxi refused a prince and is pregnant with a baby that might be more than human.

As you’d expect, this slim volume moved rather quickly. I was into it and listening and then all of a sudden it was over. WTF? Haha. I would have liked more but I appreciate what Rocklyn was able to do in such a short period of time. The story is horrific all right, but maybe not in the way I imagined. The descriptions of the living conditions in the boat and the late stages of pregnancy and birth were enough to terrify me

I’d like to revisit it at some point since I moved through it so quickly, but I’ll give it some time. I really want to dig into the language, as I often get caught up in the story and ignore the craft. I feel that, in short books, the author says so much in such a little amount of time, that I should take more care with the words, and I may have flown through this one a little too quickly the first go ’round.

Big thanks to Netgalley, Zin E Rocklyn and Dreamscape Media for the audio ARC in exchange for a review.

Iraxi is pregnant and on a boat. Not just for a ride, but because there is nothing else. At the end of the world, she and her fellow boatmates are surrounded by sea and creatures. The creatures will snatch you in the dark, right off the deck. The trees and plants they brought are dying. And the unborn are dying.
Iraxi is further along than any other woman has gotten before. Her swollen belly the only one to have the potential of bringing new life.
The day this happens, it does not go as expected. But, then again, what is expected in world overrun with deep sea creatures?

I'm giving this one 3.5, rounded up to 4. The narrator was excellent and gave Iraxi and the people on board their ship depth and life that I might not have imagined without her.
It was also a refreshing break from the typical generic Englishish accent that so many fantasy style books have.
The narrator really made this book.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going into this book, but it was really good. The story itself definitely packed a punch, and I feel like I need to read it several more times to fully understand it. There is a lot to unpack, and it’s one of those books that stick with you long after you finish.

I really liked the author’s writing style, and I will be looking to read more of their work in the future. A powerful debut!

Thank you to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for a copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

This is one of those books where I don’t think I fully appreciated what the other was thing to accomplish. Don’t get me wrong, the writing is visceral and atmospheric, but the entire storyline around the pregnancy and gruesome birth was outside of my comfort zone.

This book was nothing that I expected it to be. I thought it would be more about a broody sort of cosmic horror adventure. What I got was more of an bit of introspection and a lot of anger in between a ton of painful imagery that I didn't enjoy. The performance was really good and the book is written well. The content was lost on me.

I was given this book for my unbiased opinion.

I picked this up because I was expecting a story that would be doing that creepy, uncomfortable straddle over the place where dark fantasy bleeds into horror. But that wasn’t quite what I got – although there was plenty of uncomfortable, downright painful straddling in the book itself.

Having finished the book, it feels like I got the middle part of a story that had a lot more depth to explore – but that those deeper elements just weren’t present in the part I got.

The story begins aboard a ship that has, or at least had, some very interesting magic. The ship is and has been, floating in an endless sea, its passengers permanent exiles from a shore they left behind. Originally, the ship fed and protected and sustained them easily, but the magic is dying, or the sea is dying, or it’s all fading away.

Our perspective on the ship, its inhabitants and its circumstances is through the mind of resentful, pregnant, angry, ostracized Iraxi. She is angry at everyone on the ship, and everyone on the ship is resentful and afraid of her. Even though they all hope that the baby she has zero desire to carry or bear will save them all.

Iraxi’s perspective is an uncomfortable one. She is, herself, extremely uncomfortable in the last days of her pregnancy, and very, very angry at everyone and everything around her. Including most especially, herself.

But Iraxi’s anger is a much bigger thing than one woman – or even one ocean – can contain. All she has to do is accept it, and accept the past that brought her to this point, and it will become big enough to encompass the world – and destroy it.

Escape Rating C: Even after finishing this book, I still had more of a sense of what it was supposed to be from the blurb than from reading – actually listening to – the entire thing from beginning to end. Not that the reader didn’t do a good job, because she most definitely did, but because the story didn’t quite gel for me – or perhaps it gelled in the wrong places.

The blurb describes Flowers for the Sea as Rosemary’s Baby meets Octavia Butler, in other words a combination of horror and SF. I was expecting something at least a bit like Rivers Solomon’s marvelous The Deep, in the sense that I was expecting a story that was intended to reclaim the Middle Passage of the slave trade for its victims and away from its perpetrators.

I didn’t exactly get either of those things. Admittedly that’s at least in part because both the author and the narrator did an all too excellent job of portraying Iraxi’s unwanted, undesired, unwelcome and utterly resented pregnancy and eventual childbirth as a internal horror of anger, fear, hatred, loathing, disgust and pretty much every other negative emotion in a way that hit me right in the nightmare to the point where it overshadowed the entire story.

The other reason the story didn’t gel is that we see the entire thing from Iraxi’s perspective, and Iraxi is angry almost to the point of incoherence pretty much all of the time. She hates her circumstances, she hates her pregnancy, she hates her baby, she hates all the people aboard the ship for the way that they have forced her to carry this unwanted pregnancy to term, the way that they in their turn hate and fear her and only give a damn about the child she is carrying. She’s lonely, she’s resentful, she’s afraid and she’s hiding the reasons she is in this circumstance from herself and from the reader, only dribbling out clues and then shutting herself down before we learn what we need to know.

Paradoxically for a story that didn’t work for me, I wish this had been longer. We don’t know anything about this world, although we learn that it isn’t exactly ours. We don’t know nearly enough about Iraxi’s people, their background or how they got into this fix. We eventually get hints, but they’re not enough. More pages, more scope to learn more, would have made this work better – at least for this reader.

Your reading mileage may vary. I’m headed off to gibber in a quiet corner someplace until the nightmare passes.

An interesting read or listen, with a unique blend of history, sci-fi, and dystopian future elements.

The prose and reward yes extremely powerful. I'm not sure I completely understand the whole story and implications of the story line, if I'm being honest, however the central themes of love, humanity, and stress of isolation come through loud and clear. I still enjoyed this read and the power of the narrator, so give it try

Wow was this book a trip and a half. It honestly messed with me in a way that made me uncomfortable but I couldn't stop.

So, before I get into this, thank you NetGalley for allowing me the chance to listen to this audiobook.

Actual rating: 4.5 stars

Amina Koroma did such a wonderful job bringing this novella to life.

"Hope has no place on this vessel of death and disease, aimless and everlasting in its path."

Warning!! This review may contain some spoilers!!

When the story begins, you are immediately thrown into a world that has flooded,where this group of people (i wasn't sure if they were from the same village or not) are stuck on a boat. A world in which Iraxi, our main character, is pregnant -- the only one to have a baby last full-term, healthy and strong.

But, of course, it is monstrous.

I will say, if you've recently had a baby, are about to have a baby, are just pregnant or trying to conceive... read/listen with caution! I recently had my daughter and from the beginning of this I was squirming all the way through to the end. Body horror at its finest.

I think maybe my only issue was clarification. I needed to know a little bit more about what she was, what the things in the water were, and whether what she was seeing was real or not. I definitely began questioning her at one point as to whether or not she was a reliable narrator.

I loved the rawness of the story. The emotions, the horror, the mythology... it all came together to create such a beautiful story.

I really enjoyed the prose of this book, it was quite beautiful. But that's where the positives end for me though. Mostly this book was just gory and unmemorable.
The length was also a downfall. There definitely needed to be more pages for this story to achieve its full potential

Flowers for the Sea was delightfully weird and did not pull punches. It’s a novella so it’s short, but I do wish there could have been a bit more world-building in the beginning. I felt confused a lot and had to use the rewind button enough that it somewhat took me out of the story. While I loved the narrator, perhaps the format of the story would have been easier for me to follow via physical book or ebook.

**3.5-stars rounded up**

For me, this reading experience was very similar to my time spent with The Deep by Rivers Solomon. My first reaction upon completion with both novellas was, what in the heck did I just read? Followed shortly thereafter by thoughts such as, <i>that was gorgeous writing, this is beautiful and important, and finally, I wish I had a better understanding of it</i>.

Flowers for the Sea is Dark Fantasy novella centering around Iraxi, a headstrong, powerful woman trapped on a claustrophobic-feeling ark sailing the high seas. For a good portion of the story she is struggling through the last moments of, what seems to be, an unwanted pregnancy. Iraxi's emotions take center stage as she works through anger, pain, revenge and motherhood. It's a lot.

A story set at sea, with a sea creature aspect, this is an intriguing premise and the writing shows so much promise. I would love to read more from Zin E. Rocklyn; hopefully at some point in a longer format, so I can really settle into their style and ideas.

Thank you so much to the publisher, Dreamscape Media, for providing me with an Audio-ARC to listen to and review. I am really happy I had the opportunity to check this one out. It was memorable!

I received this book as an audiobook eARC from Netgalley. All opinions are my own!

Iraxi is a refugee on an arc full of her people who have fled from their flooded home. But she's got an extra problem - she's pregnant, and her child might be a little more than human.

I had really high hopes for this novella, but in the end it just really fell flat for me. There was little to no backstory about the people, why they were on the boat, who Iraxi was, or literally anything that would have given the story more depth. There was really nothing to get me interested in the characters and their lives and who they might be as people. The only thing that kept me hooked was simply wanting to know what would happen and knowing that the book was not that long.

I also didn't really enjoy the depictions of labor/birth and found them to be pretty inaccurate. There's no way on earth that a woman is having passionate sex while in active labor...and enjoying it. The depictions of labor ended up being more horrifying than the creatures that were meant to be the horror part of the novella.

Overall, I just wish there was more to this story. The writing was lyrical and really set up the world, but everything else fell flat to me.

Advanced Reader’s Copy provided by NetGalley and Dreamscape Media in exchange for an honest review.

For a novella, a LOT happens. For me this meant that at times it was hard to follow the plot. I wouldn't exactly call this a gothic fantasy, but it is a solid sci-fi/fantasy novella.

It's an odd story, one that kind of starts in the middle so you're learning about what has already happened while seeing current events unfold. I'm still not entirely sure what I listened to, but I did enjoy it.

Amina Koroma does a great job with the audiobook narration.

This was a snippet or a glance at…. I’m not really sure what to call it. A life? A culture? A women? What ever this was, it was well written. And I mean that in the sense of describing and explaining things in a new way to me. There was such feeling in everything. Even though I was mostly confused about what was happening I thought the writing was beautiful. I was right there with her, experiencing the pain and smells. Feeling the dread of it all. Well done.
I chose to listen to this book on audio and the narrator was Amina Koroma and she was amazing. This was only 2 hours and 24 minutes.
Thanks Dreamscape Media via Netgalley.