I loved all four of the books produced during the Year of Sanderson Kickstarter event. My favorite had to be Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, but it was a real toss-up between Tress of the Emerald Sea and Yumi. It’s not surprising when I read the author’s notes at the end. I love any book that starts with a What-If? Idea. During COVID, Sanderson and his wife watched The Princess Bride, a favorite movie of mine, and Sanderson asked himself, what if Buttercup didn’t just accept her fate when she found out Wesley had been captured by the Dread Pirate Roberts? What if Buttercup decided to venture out onto the seas and discover the fate of her beloved?
Tress of the Emerald Sea is a Cosmere novel, so excpect Cosmere magic. There are twelve different seas on this planet, but they’re not seas of water, they are seas of spores. These spores stream down from the twelve moons and each different color of spores has different properties when water is introduced. The spores of the Emerald Sea sprout into vines with the addition of water. Tress’ beloved went missing somewhere between the red and black sea, and she is not going to let his fate remain a mystery. Even if that means she has to sail to the witch at the heart of the black sea and ask her what happened to her beloved. Sanderson took Buttercup, a character that had no agency in her own story, and created a character that forcibly seized agency.
What was really fun about this book, was that unlike Mistborn and Stormlight Archives, we were dealing with a semi-omniscient narrator. And what narrator would be the best to tell a Cosmere story? How about the character that travels the Cosmere and interacts with all the major characters of each story? Of course, the one and only Hoyd. Hoyd is on the ship that Tress eventually ends up on, but there is a problem, he’s an imbecile. He does weird things like eat his shoelaces and seems unable to communicate with anyone in a meaningful way. Why is Hoyd acting so weird? Well weird for him, which is a relatively vague term. I think he hit himself over the head with a rock until he was dumb enough to understand a conversation once.
I normally listen to books, and with the Sanderson novels, that can sometimes result in missing out on the amazing artwork Sanderson commissions to accompany his stories. Pledging for the year of Sanderson was a great idea. I not only got the audiobook, but also received a PDF of each book that contained the beautiful art that he has included in his novels.