All Flowers Bloom by Kawika Guillermo
I would like to thank the author for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Westphalia Press
Published – Out Now
Price - £8.83 Kindle eBook
In a cruise ship stateroom, a soul awkens in the afterlife, still dressed in the Roman servant garbs of his previous life.
He can’t remember much, but a silent woman stands out in his memory: his first and only love.
Unable to cope with an eternity without her, he leaps from the ship and back into the depths of the life stream.
Five hundred years later, he awakens again in the same stateroom, alone and fueled with new memories of her.
In his past lives she was a male insurgent, an elderly wise woman, an unruly servant.
For a millennia the pair are tethered together, clashing in love and fear, betraying each other in times of war and famine.
Before memory drives him mad, he vows to rescue her from the stream — even if it takes a thousand lifetimes more.
I believe it was the philosopher Willow who told Buddy that love makes you do the wacky. There is a line between finding the person you know is right for you and the person you think it is. How far would you go to tell someone? Kawika Guillermo takes this to the extremes moving through time, space, gender and even forms of life in the weird and ambitious tale All Flowers Bloom.
We meet someone we will know as Soul 187 at the fall of the Temple of Solomon in circa 600 BCE. She is a servant trying to keep her group of children alive and safe in besieged Jerusalem. Her hope is a guard that we will know as S who occasionally brings food for the surviving family – their relationship is tacit but yet to be fully taken forward 187 passes away through starvation. Five hundred years later S is now a Parthian man who briefly meets S in a village and then battles end his life. Eventually 187 arrives in a cruise ship – Ilium a place where souls eventually arrive before the next step but there is no sign of S and they cannot afford to lose their chance of happiness. 187 dives into the stream of time and continually gets born, meets S and dies across the past and the future of humanity. Unfortunately, their encounters often arrive in some of the darker moments of time – is love enough to get these two souls finally together?
This story is ambitious. Guillermo has created a tale of continual short chapters set in various centuries past and future creating scenarios where S and 187 are encountering each other. 187 is always slightly aware that S exists while S is unaware but somehow always crosses their paths. The strength of the story is each scenario creates a different period and culture. In the years before now it’s exploring the history not just of western Europe but parts of Asia and Africa that writers tend to forget about. In the future we get humanity reaching beyond our current world, destroying Earth, meeting other races and even Guillermo successfully gives 187 our core narrator a singular voice despite them changing gender, time and ethnicity. 187 gets to be oppressed and oppressor, warrior and slave, rich and poor. It’s that interesting perspective which for me was the driver as each chapter gave me something new to explore as well in the past remind us how humanity soars and falls and making the realistic prediction we probably will continue to meander on that path – not getting wiser just living and trying to love (neither character remembers what their previous lives had until they die again).
Guillermo adds a metaphysical dimension with the concept of Ilium – where souls live on an endless cruise ship with memories of their former lives and can change forms and their rooms at will. 187’s quest brings the attention of the mysterious Cryss frustrated at 187 forever trying to meet S and not accept the idea of losing their memories and moving on. Meanwhile in some of 187’s lives they meet the strange magical figure known as the Destroyer who seems to want 187 to make certain moves for their own agenda – this makes it a tale of magic, a battle for humanity and civilisation but with a huge personal dimension of someone trying to finally meet their soulmate; but is that too much to expect? Guillermo has a fascinating vivid style that really makes the settings come alive
It’s certainly one of the most unique tales I’ve read in a while with an ambitious setting that reminds me a lot of This is How You Lose the Time War with a love story set across the whole of time and space. My only reservation was that although each time period is unique it sometimes can get a little repetitive and loses pace a lot but the dazzling variety of past and future moments in history, I think made this on balance a very interesting tale well worth a look.
ps as book availability is tricky at the moment you can find places to get this via https://westphaliapress.org/2020/01/06/all-flowers-bloom/
