Tammy L Witzens

Taking a look at her author profile, I found that Tammy Witzens is also an artist - which didn't surprise me much because Mother Fucking Flowers, her debut novella, is in a lot of ways like a painting. The imagery is very visual - and vivid, the writing itself done in bold brushstrokes and loud, almost garish, colours: surrealist maybe, or expressionist.
   I'll admit, I wasn't exactly bowled over at first: the impression was of being machine-gunned (or I suppose, action-painted) by lots and lots of quirky ideas. This is pretty typical, I was thinking, of a new author: just throw enough stuff at the canvas and some of it will stick. The setting is a version of the multiverse, an infinite and ever-branching array of universes - built from spacetime and governed on the grand scale by relativity theory - in which, according to many physicists, we may actually live. Daisy, our heroine, is an expert at travelling this infinity; her profession is bounty hunter and her mission, here in MFF, to go to one of the uncharted universes and assassinate its version of Adolf Hitler.
   I did, though, also realise pretty quickly that there's more here than meets the eye: lots of quirky ideas up close, yes, but seen from halfway across the room...squinting a bit...something else. And then I reached the surprise ending.
   As with a painting, different readers will probably see different things in this too, or appreciate it in quite different ways; but for what it's worth, here's what I made of it. (What follows is a horrendous spoiler - don't even think of peeping).
   The whole thing (apart from the ending) is the dream of a daisy in a field. Bellis perennis is the common daisy (Bellis = Belle and perennis = perennial, indestructible). 'Bruisewort' ('wort' meaning root) is an old country name for the same plant. This daisy is dreaming about itself, but on a vast scale - a single daisy as the entire cosmos. The way this cosmic daisy works is relativity theory - relativity, you could almost say, is its character, its spirit; and from its field (yep, field) equations we get 't' for time, 'M' for mass and 'c' for the speed of light which is at the very heart of Einstein's theory (and is also Daisy's middle name). There's more, but I think that's enough to be going on with...
   ...except for this: daisies aren't actually single flowers; each one is a multitude of tiny flowers combined to form a flowerhead we call a daisy; daisies are composite, not one but many...like our multiverse. The idea of the cosmos as a flower is an ancient one - the lotus blossom for example - but seeing our modern physicist's composite cosmos in a composite flower is an idea I've not come across before. The multiverse as a flowerhead opening and blooming continuously; it's a stunning image.
   Well, I hope you didn't peep (it's no good at second hand, you have to see this for yourself; a sixteenth-century painter called Archimboldo specialised in this sort of thing, and in the twentieth Salvador Dali explored it too).
   As I said, in some respects this is a typical first published work - but by the same token, for a new writer it's also unusually inventive, imaginative, off-the-wall and, like a good painting, it lodged an image in my mind which I've been thinking about ever since.… (más)

I received this book as part of a goodreads giveaway.

I really enjoy reading sci-fi novels. I'm not a fan of novellas. I find that they're too short and unless they're in between the main books of a series, there's never enough "meat" in them. I found the same with this book. I didn't realize how short of a novel it was until I received it. The plot was definitely interesting but again, I feel like it could have been developed more. The basic concept of the book was intriguing of parallel universes. The main character seemed very brusque and the dialogue seemed choppy. The chapters seemed choppy, as well, with interruptions in the storyline to give background on a small mentioned topic in the preceding chapter. These could have easily done as a footnote or maybe an appendix of sorts.

And I didn't understand the ending. I completely missed the point of the last chapter and felt incredibly confused. However, because of this, I'll most likely try to re-read the last few chapters to see if I can gain a better understanding of what that entire last chapter was about.

All in all, an ok book. I would definitely read it again if it was developed into a proper novel with more "meat" as I like to say.… (más)