Editorial review
When Worlds Collide
By Melanie Flores
What wouldn’t a mother do to protect her family?
Reviewed by CANREADS
What wouldn’t a mother do to protect her family?
The world-hopping, time-skipping, science fiction adventure When Worlds Collide by Melanie Flores explores this very question, following Cat, a mother and magic healer, as she travels across time and space to prevent the kidnapping of her infant daughter by imperial conquerors. Cat’s world, called Oaken, is threatened by the conquering Androgen empire and the mysterious Forgetting Plague, which corrodes the Oaken people’s cultural repository of knowledge and magic. Cat embarks on an epic, action-packed quest to stop both these threats, gaining new friends and uncovering ancient secrets about her family—including her own daughter’s true heritage—on the way.
In When Worlds Collide, Flores combines adventurous, fast-paced, vignette-like chapters with social observation that grapples with themes of motherhood, femininity, and identity. How can women protect and support each other in societies that don’t value them? How can evil be passed down or inherited across time? Flores meaningfully challenges the roles women are forced to fit into, giving readers a thought-provoking tale that travels across worlds.
The novel’s greatest strength is undoubtedly the cast: Flores has crafted a bounty of strong, decisive female characters whom readers won’t soon forget. Cat’s alliance and growing friendship with Chloe, the former unwilling mistress of the Androgen conqueror Gormesydd, empowers her to search for a cure for the Forgetting Plague and ultimately reunite with her daughter. Meanwhile, the support and wisdom of Pebble, Cat’s closest family, allows Cat to discover and confront the mysterious and dangerous legacy of Wick, Cat’s lover and father of her child. Even across worlds, Flores never loses sight of the power of women standing together.
While much of the novel deals in the fantastic or mystical or even absurd, it is hardly a gentle story. Violence—particularly sexual or gendered violence—is common in Flores’s universe. Intense sequences involving injury, death, and brutality lend a darker tone to what is otherwise a propulsive quest narrative. Readers who enjoy an action-oriented science fiction filled with expansive worldbuilding and ambitious ideas will appreciate Flores’s willingness to explore difficult themes alongside imaginative concepts like the Forgetting Plague and Sensimorphs.
The novel’s fast pace keeps the story exciting, but it also leaves little room for readers to fully settle into its world. Rapid shifts between scenes and points of view can feel jarring, and moments that deserve more attention—such as Chloe’s brief time as the Queen of Music—pass so quickly that they struggle to reach their full emotional impact. The dialogue is similarly uneven, occasionally feeling more expository than natural. A stronger balance between dialogue, exposition, and narrative prose, smoother transitions between perspectives, and an additional round of proofreading would have created a more cohesive and immersive novel. Still, Flores is evidently a skilled writer and her imagination is undeniable; her story simply deserves more room to breathe.
If you loved the resilient women and expansive science fiction of N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, then you’ll love the Flores’s protagonists. Set across a compelling intergalactic universe, When Worlds Collide is a fast-paced and wide-ranging adventure about a group of women fighting prejudice, inequality, and cruelty, all while protecting what matters most: family.
—CANREADS BOOK REVIEW