Tress of the Emerald Sea Review

As an author, a reader, an autodidact, and someone who writes these book reviews on a weekly basis, I’m the last person to wonder why I should read (I even wrote a post about why you should read, too). Since roughly the second grade, I’ve enjoyed reading – it’s been an escape, a way to learn about the world, a way to experience wondrous and incredible things – whether that’s high fantasy or rigorous nonfiction. Recently, though, I’ve been struggling to engage with what I’ve been reading.

A string of books that weren’t what I hoped for didn’t help: Riddle-Master, Ignorance, and The Satyricon were all disappointing in one way or another, even though Riddle-Master is the sort of book I should have latched onto most intently. Thistlefoot was enjoyable enough, and a very tightly presented and technically executed piece of writing, but it didn’t quite scratch the itch I’ve been developing. Years ago, I could sit with a book and lose track of hours as the pages went by, devouring eight hundred or thousand page novels in just two or three days, and I don’t really do that anymore.

Part of the reason is that, as my reading tastes have broadened beyond the fantasy and science fiction pieces with which I filled nearly all of my reading time in those earlier days, I have trained myself to read more closely, to examine the text for context and historical tie-ins. Reading more closely means reading a little slower, and I can’t entirely turn that function off when I’m not reading a scientific paper or piece of historical literature. Plus, my writing, and study thereof, means that I am more aware of the technical side of the writing, and it is more difficult for me to fully engage with a story if I’m instead pondering how the author is manipulating pacing, characterization, foreshadowing, and other techniques to make the story work.

All of which is to say that, after I finished The Dictionary of Body Language, I resolved to return to my roots, as it were, to pick up something that I was confident would scratch that itch and remind me how much I truly enjoy stories. Sanderson’s Tress of the Emerald Sea seemed the perfect vehicle, and I was right. This book was exactly the refresh I needed.

It’s almost-but-not-quite a fairy tale, very clearly inspired by The Princess Bride (as Sanderson has expressed several times), though that is not to say that it is derivative – you will just notice certain resonances if you are familiar with both works. It’s set in the Cosmere, with some pretty overt Cosmere elements if you know what you’re looking for and are familiar with the corpus of Sanderson’s work, but they were better integrated and less obtrusive than in The Lost Metal.

Nearly everything about the story worked for me, so much so that my only real, substantial critique is about the narrator’s voice. Hoid, who has been hopping Sanderson’s worlds pretty much since the beginning, is the one supposedly telling us this story, and his style works most of the time. Where it doesn’t quite work for me is when he tries to be too relatable, to aware of the readers, because the readers are not the Cosmere residents to whom he would be telling the story. Thus, there are several places where Hoid will employ obvious anachronisms, and those points threatened to draw me out of the story.

Fortunately, I was always pulled right back in by Tress’s adventures. She’s really a wonderful character, and her and the world in which she lives carry the book. The rest of the characters are somewhat flat – not that they don’t have all the little bits dropped here and there to make them seem like full people, they’re just a little too convenient, very much there to support Tress’s story – and the plot is a little contrived…but none of that really matters, because that’s not what this particular story is about. It is meant to be light, to be about Tress, to capture that sense of wild imagination, of wonder, of daring and coming of age and possibly a bit of whimsy, and it does that wonderfully.

If you want a deep book that you can employ reading as an intellectual bludgeon, something where you have to consider the implications of the color of the curtains in the tertiary character’s bathroom in order to grasp the full impact of the story, don’t pick up this book. Sometimes, we want heavier books, things that will expand our minds and teach us something new. Other times, we want something that’s a story, something familiar and new simultaneously, something lighthearted, something that isn’t full of angst and darkness. If the latter is what you’re looking for, pick up Tress of the Emerald Sea. It was exactly the refresh I needed, and it might just do the same for you.