Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

Tress of the Emerald Sea
by Brandon Sanderson
Dragonsteel Entertainment 2023

When Brandon Sanderson launched his Kickstarter campaign in 2022 to promote four secret project books, it created a ripple of waves through the bookish hobby. The campaign went on to be incredibly successful, showing that an established and popular author can break new ground in the publishing industry. The first book, Tress of the Emerald Sea, has made its way into the hands of backers, and if this is an example of the sort of book his backers can look forward to, there are likely to be a lot of very happy readers this year.

Tress of the Emerald Sea is set in Sanderson’s Cosmere, which is the terminology for a connected set of bookish worlds written by Brandon Sanderson. This allows the books to be very different in style and setting, while also having nuggets of details sprinkled throughout which demonstrate that interconnected nature between his books. Tress takes place on a world that is new to Sanderson’s Cosmere and features a likeable protagonist who sets out on an adventure to save the prince she loves. The narrator for the book, the reader quickly discovers, is a recurring character across many of the Cosmere novels whose witty nature makes for an interesting choice in this role. It provides a fun, light-hearted atmosphere to a book that takes place in a rather brutal world full of spores that are lethal - particularly around water. Appropriately, Tress spends a significant portion of the novel aboard a ship sailing through various seas - each containing a different variety of spore which range from growing tentacle-like vines, becoming lethal needle-like spikes, and projecting shadow creatures that roam the sea.

The adventures of Tress, a young window washer from a kingdom upon a rock, are delightfully whimsical. We see tremendous growth in the character along the journey, going from needing assistance to get her journey underway to coming full circle with her climactic confrontation in the final chapters. Yet it is the moments between those two points where the book genuinely shines as we see a girl struggling to come to terms with a world far bigger - and deadlier - than she had ever imagined. She progresses along from stowaway to a crew member earning her keep and, inevitably, facing down Herculean tasks in order to accomplish her goal of saving the prince she loves.

As he has proven time and again, Sanderson excels at delivering a novel with punchy pacing, witty humor, vibrant characters, and fascinating magic systems. When a reader picks up one of his novels, they have a fairly good idea of the experience they are going to get, yet it is the ways in which he innovates the new worlds that makes each series feel unique and refreshing. Even though these stories are all connected in ways that are becoming clearer with each new installment in the Cosmere, it is precisely the new and unexpected elements that hooks those who have delved deep into Sanderson’s catalog.

For many years I’ve advocated for two potential starting points on where to begin reading Sanderson: Mistborn: The Final Empire or Steelheart. This book, unfortunately, doesn’t replace either of them for that recommendation, and that primarily comes from the presence of the narrator to the book himself - there are a lot of subtleties laced into this book that would then require a second visit much later in the Cosmere reading order. However, apart from that, this is an extremely easy book to recommend to readers looking for a new Fantasy book to pick up. Those not interested in delving into a massive connected Cosmere could treat this book as a standalone Fantasy read, and it would still provide a really entertaining and engaging experience - albeit with references and nuances that wouldn’t make much sense in isolation, but the overall arc is fairly self-contained. The short chapters make the book feel like it is sailing by quickly, and the reader can develop a strong bond with Tress and some of her supporting cast before the end of the book. If this is the sort of quality we can expect from the other three books in 2023, then readers will have a very solid read arriving each quarter this year.

David Wiley is the author Monster Huntress and A Merchant in Oria and Other Tales. He's a book reviewer living in Winterset, Iowa