It's not that I didn't like Flowers for the Sea, it's that it didn't seem to have a character arc. I felt like this would be a better story if it had been another 100 pages longer. (It's only about 100 pages long.) Iraxi is angry, and she has a right to be as she and her family have had unspeakable things done to them, but there seems to be no inner journey for her, where she builds up to her greatness. She 's angry, as I said, she hates being pregnant, doesn't want the child she's carrying, calling it a parasite, hates all the men she has sex with (but keeps copulating anyway) and then her newborn child tells her she's destined for greatness and then marvelous, supernatural, violent things happen. The newborn baby has quite the vocabulary.!
What I mean is, Iraxi is rewarded without rising above her anger. I didn't see a hero's journey, or it was a very compressed hero's journey. A longer story would have given her room to transform, where we would see her transformation from anger to heroism. The writing was fine. Flowers for the Sea was medium on my smirk-o-meter. There was some smirking, eye-ball rolling, hissing, and balling up of the fists, and a couple of people had to bite their lips. Not as much as most modern books.
Thank you to Netgalley, Tor, and the author for loaning me an ebook of Flowers for the Sea in exchange for an honest review.
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