Review: Tress of the Emerald Sea

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm not sure precisely what I was expecting from this, but it wasn't exactly what I got. What I got was better, though.

It's told deceptively simply, and has a 17-year-old protagonist, so is it YA? The author says in his afterword that it was aimed at adults (and I enjoyed it, but then I do enjoy YA from time to time). He also says that his influences included Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch , which I can totally see. I kept getting a welcome Terry Pratchett vibe off the absurdities, wordplay, and pithy wisdom about the human condition that the narrator provides us with.

The narrator is Hoid, a trickster figure who appears in various books set in Sanderson's Cosmere universe; I didn't remember him from any of his appearances, which are generally on the periphery of events, but then I don't have an encyclopedic grasp of the Cosmere (far from it). In this book, he's been cursed to absurdity by the Sorceress, who is a traditional-feeling sorceress with impressively fairy-taleish powers of cursing, despite her interplanetary origins and the general science-fictional feel that Sandersonian fantasy often has.

Yes, there is, of course, completely original worldbuilding. Sanderson is the exact opposite of the all-too-common author who effectively grabs a few left-over scenery flats from an old production of some other sword-and-sorcery novel (or rather, almost any other sword-and-sorcery novel) to serve as a mostly non-functional backdrop to their also-not-original plot and characters. Every world he creates has some clever, innovative, meticulously worked out point of difference (or, usually, several of them) which the characters exploit creatively to progress and resolve the plot.

This one has spore seas. The planet is surrounded by twelve moons, tidally locked and geostationary, each of which pours down a different kind of spore, forming twelve connected seas. Air bubbling up from underneath makes them behave like water, but they're not water; water, in fact, makes the spores sprout, explosively and dangerously, and, of course, each one has a different effect, whether it's growing sudden vines, burning fiercely, exploding in a puff of air, growing a crystal, creating sharp, dangerous shards, or even forming into creatures that can be controlled as familiars. (That's six; we don't get to hear about the other six, which presumably are on the other side of the planet.)

Our hero, Tress, lives on a small island in the Emerald Sea, the one whose spores grow into vines. She's shyly in love with the son of the local duke, who pretends to be the duke's gardener so they can meet on a more equal basis, even though he's no good at lying and both of them know that both of them know it's a polite fiction. When he gets captured by the Sorceress, Tress decides that nobody else is going to rescue him, so she has to (this idea came from Sanderson's wife wondering aloud to him what would have happened if Buttercup had gone after Westley instead of becoming the Princess Bride, a very fair question which addresses the biggest flaw of that wonderful film).

Tress is exactly the kind of protagonist I particularly love, and is about 50% responsible for the fifth star I'm giving this book; the other 50% is its depth of reflection on humanity. She's a deeply pragmatic, sensible young woman, unwaveringly courageous because she cares about her cause (rescuing Charlie), intelligent and creative in the solutions she comes up with, and wins practically everyone she meets to her cause because she's genuinely kind and decent without even thinking about it. I totally believed a duke's son would fall in love with her, if he had the basic sense to see what was right in front of him. She is, in a way, an "ordinary" hero - not powerful, not noble, not fated, not Chosen, which I always approve of in protagonists - and yet she's completely extraordinary. There's a lovely passage about how all the other girls she knew declared they weren't like everyone else, and she came to the conclusion that she (alone) must be "everyone else," in part because all the other girls were so good at being unique that they all did it in unison. In other words, she doesn't have a decal on her that says she's different, talented, intelligent and courageous; she actually is those things, but in a natural and unassuming way, and that makes her able to face her challenges without the author having to gift her any emergency last-minute powers that she hasn't worked for, like all those entitled Chosen One idiots.

The author does need to commit a couple of Fortunate Coincidences to get his cast together, but they're subtle enough - and troublesome enough for long enough - that I only spotted them when I thought about them afterwards, so I think he gets away with it by the Pixar Rules.

The minor characters all have things they want and pursue them in ways that make sense and, together with Tress protagonising away like mad, create the plot naturally. It's a strong plot, with sound emotional beats, dramatic moments, loss and perseverance, and character change that, again, feels organic.

As usual with Sanderson, who runs his books past a couple of dozen people at least before they're published, the editing is very clean. All I spotted was a page where the same word is spelled "eyedropper" twice and "eye dropper" once, and a dangling modifier which starts out talking about some golems in a sentence where the grammatical subject is not the golems, but Tress. It's a medium-large book, so this counts as practically impeccable.

I frequently give Sanderson's books five stars, more so than any other author, and it's not just because the characters he writes are exactly the kind of character I like to read about (though certainly that). It's because his craft is absolutely sound, and on that strong foundation he erects brilliant worlds that nobody else could think of, and that are absolutely integral to how the plot works out. There are other authors with sound craft, but without his wild creativity; sadly, there are a good many who have wild creativity, but without the proper foundation of craft (or basic writing mechanics) to live up to the potential of their ideas. Sanderson is a triple threat: he can tell an inspiring story with wonderful characters, can spell and punctuate, and can take you to a world of wonder you've never visited before.

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