Review by anna_fangirling - Tress of the Emerald Sea

anna_fangirling 's review for:

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

4.0

adventurous emotional funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted reflective medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

This book had me so torn.

If you have not read a Sanderson book before, don’t start here.

Starting off with what I liked. Tress as a character was compelling. A get worried about the Strong Female Character ™ when written by men but I feel like Tress’ motivations and arc overall were done well. This flips the script of the damsel in distress. While Tress’ spark for adventure was initiated due to a man, I think that she had more than just Charlie as a reason to start on the journey she did, he was simply the push she needed to actually do it. I loved her tenacity, her resilience, her cleverness. I also love when characters have a very niche and unique character trait that adds to the depth of them even if the story does not seem to rely on it; such as Tress and her collection of cups. As someone who has a hoard of mugs, it made her feel more real.

Tress of the Emerald Sea also has some poignant lines about life, existence, and the nature of being. Some of these lines I felt were just thrown in there, like Sanderson couldn’t decide on how many points he wanted to make, but I appreciated them all the same.

If you know me, you know I love analyzing disability representation. I LOVE when accommodations are made magical instead of simply curing the disability or ignoring/excluding disability overall. The use of an AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) magical device made my heart so happy and I feel it was written well. There was something at the end that I loved connected to this however it would be slightly spoilers to say it.

Lastly, the ending was excellent. Great way to wrap up the story, with some twists that made sense once they were revealed.

The biggest drawback for me was the narrative voice. I really struggled to get through the story in the beginning because of the voice Sanderson decided to tell this story through. Without reading his other works, in which Hoid has been in, I found Hoid to be a smart aleck in a way that was annoying, the various seemingly random lore drops without much explanation as to how it connects to the main story of our girl Tress here. Having a character integral to the plot without knowing that he is in other books of Sanderson’s was something I only found out via a friend. I do not mind subtley and do not expect everything to be revealed about a character at the front or explicitly told, necessarily. But I felt that the tiny doses we got in the beginning were not enough to buy into the character to be likeable; it wasn’t until I understood his existence outside of this lone story and until later (last 100 pages) that I was invested in his story. This is called Tress of the Emerald Sea, not Hoid of the Plane of Lumar. The reader has to get to a certain point in the book to make a connection with Hoid. I was only able to power through, to GET to the switch over, because of how compelling Tress and her continued situation and growth was. If this was told a different way – maybe switching narrative voices between Tress and Hoid? – I would have enjoyed it more. Narrative voice for me is important; I want to enjoy reading the book and I want it to not be forced. I want to know my characters to a certain degree at certain mileage in a book.

Essentially, I liked the story but not the way in which it was told.

Content Warnings