Tress of the Emerald Sea The Cosmere (Secret Project #1)
Reviews
cute and whimsical and a delightful fairytale to escape into
Sanderson é um autor que a muito tempo queria desbravar, e começar por esse livro foi uma ótima escolha. não é, por nenhum parâmetro, o melhor livro de fantasia da terra (não é nem o melhor livro dele) mas a historia é tão envolvente e comovente que faz valer a pena todos os eventuais problemas que encontrei pelo caminho. ps o magic system dele é tão inovador e criativo que penso nele quase toda vez que vou lavar a louça.
wowie baby’s first fantasy
Brandon Sanderson experiments with a much needed new narrative voice. Unfortunately it's kind of annoying and bad.
Starting the cosmere asap
A very solid book with interesting lessons on humanity, personal growth, and introspection. I unfortunately could not get very absorbed in the narrative point of view, and I believe it is a side effect of this being my first foray into the Cosmere.
BrandoSando with another winner! A bit of a str eye ch for any non-fantasy plebeians. Only due to it being in another “world” and boats sailing on spores and things like that. Just gotta workout that left brain a bit, or right brain idk. Mine hardly works anyway.
A nice straight up start to finish underestimate here novel. Fresh out the cookie cutter, nothing wrong with it, nothing crazy about it. For the Sandersahn fans get in, for you normal folk, skip.
Wow. I understand the Brandon Sanderson hype. This was my first novel by him and to me it was an amazing place to start. The world is so unique and imaginative I’m super impressed. He also kept me on the edge of my seat with the twists that felt like they came out of nowhere. Loved it all.
So much fun — and such witty writing. Loved the characters, the dialogue, and the overall plot. I knocked a star off, though, because I found the middle 60% of the book a bit slow. Lot of being on a pirate ship and chatting with the crew. The information in that section was certainly important… I just felt it dragged a bit and was a bit repetitive. Overall, a great read!
I LOVED THIS! I will say the writing style was, while clearly done purposefully, a learning curve because it’s very informal and loops back on itself, but as the book went on I loved it more and more, especially as the narration took on more life and the story got deeper and deeper. I really loved this! in a way it was very unsurprising this was inspired by princess bride and good omens, though the entire book felt very much like stardust to me if we’re picking a neil gaiman inspo. but the characters were so lovable and I just love a story that wraps itself up cleverly and neatly by the end. I love a good ending. this is my first sanderson but definitely not my last!
A short, witty, fast-paced adventure! Gives princess bride vibes
I, personally, didn’t get the hype around this; especially as my first read of the very popular Brandon Sanderson.
However! My experience was greatly improved about a third of the way in when I decided to imagine this as a Muppets movie (think Treasure Island, Christmas Carol, etc). I’m not sure how much of that is due to the narrator's performance vs Sanderson’s writing. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it.
Rating: 4.5 stars As soon as I learned about the secret projects I knew I would enjoy them immensely and I'm not surprised to report I loved the first one. Tres of the Emerald Sea is the whimsical tale of an ordinary girl living in a rock in the middle of the emerald sea whose life is suddenly changed when her beloved gets taken from her and she decides to go save him. I never wonder what Brandon Sanderson writing a fairy tale would be like but I think this is the closes we are going to get to that. This story was full of charm and adventure while having a really well developed magic system that I hope we get to experience in the future. A very good start to the secret novels, i can't wait for the rest.
This is definitely my favourite book of the year so far, and it will be hard to take its place. I can’t talk much about it without spoiling and writing a wall of text, so my advice is just go read it. This book is a delight!
Tress of the Emerald Sea: 5/5 HOLY CRAP!!! This book is so good. Sometimes all you need is a fairytale to pick you up. This book exudes adult fairytales but fixes everything you may hate about children's books. Tress was a wild ride from start to finish & it's easily one of my favorite books I've ever read. What a good breath of fresh air. Literally incredible.
** spoiler alert ** 4- Liked: world building Disliked: hoid as narrator, too fourth wall-y, didn't feel so many cosmere tie-ins were necessary
i loved everything about this book. the characters were so lovable and relatable from tress all the way through the crew members on the ship. for some reason despite the title i wasn’t expecting it the setting but i quickly got drawn in and was amazed by the world building, even though it was a little confusing at first, once i got it, it was so vivid it read like a movie. tress was so relatable from her motivations to her sadness and her determination despite her fears and feelings of inadequacy was so great to read. i love love love this book so much.
I’ve been looking forward to reading this for awhile and it did not disappoint! A modern fairytale, turned slightly on its side with stakes just as creative but non-threatening. It reminds me a lot of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. Genuinely funny, whitty, and entertaining, it was hard to put this book down!
realized i never left a review after finishing this! (i did talk about it on twitter though) after sitting with it for a while, i can confidently say this has become a new favorite. this book completely took me by surprise. i got it for my birthday in june and went into it knowing absolutely nothing! which worked in my favor i think. i loved it so much. in my opinion, it was a perfect introduction to brandon sanderson's cosmere. there were small references i didn't have context for but they didn't take away from my enjoyment of the story. in fact, it made me more curious to read more books in this universe. there are SO many things i can say about this story, i don't even know where to begin. the whimsical world tress lives in was just so fun to read about. i was immersed in such a colorful world the whole time. the world building was one of my favorite parts of the whole book. as well as the characters!!!! each one is so well written and thought out and compelling in their own ways. i love tress and huck sooo much!! and the whole pirate crew. it was a bit of a found family, especially towards the end <3 also, the narration by hoid was absolutely charming and hilarious. i was left feeling so happy and full of warm, fuzzy feelings after reading this. :)
I'm not one to DNF books but this book was so bad. I tried so hard to like it too. I started it over TWICE because I really thought I was missing something. The narration was weird and boring and didn't describe anything? So much telling and not enough showing. Super disappointing for such a highly recommended author. Not super motivated to read anything else of his.
I DNF. Got through 72 pages. I don’t like the narrator’s voice at all. The writing style isn’t for me. It’s really serving male author writing female character, and I can’t get into it.
I am a Brando Sando person and this is exactly what I want from him and he keeps smashing out bangers and I keep consuming them like my life depends on it and maybe it does. Maybe it does.
I will Stan a talking rat every time. More rats. Infinity rats.
deliciously strange. the postscript says the story was inspired by The Princess Bride and Good Omens and IT SHOWS. now I have to read every Brandon Sanderson book oops.
"You see, I've discovered that it's all right to need help. So long as you've lived your life as the kind of person who deserves to be rescued." I'll be honest and say I didn't know what to make of this when I first started it. Aside from being aware that it was a Cosmere book, I went in basically blind, ready for a twisty whirlwind epic fantasy adventure. Instead, I got something a bit more thoughtful, a lot more tongue-in-cheek, and perhaps more fairy tale than epic fantasy. Temper your expectations accordingly; this is more like Sanderson-writes-Princess-Bride rather than 1000-page-Sanderson-Epic-Fantasy. (view spoiler)[Tress grew up on a small spit of rocky land in the middle of a green spore sea. No seawater, all green pollen that reacts violently when exposed to water. In the case of green spores, you get a wild vine explosion that can be rather, well, deadly if the water ends up being human water (of which, we have a lot of). There's different colored spore seas, and each of the different spore colors reacts differently when given water. So, content with her life, her crush ends up getting himself kidnapped by the Sorceress of this world, who resides all the way over in the Midnight Sea. What follows is Tress's quest to save the one dear to her, and all that she learns about herself, her resourcefulness, and the larger world she never knew along the way. (hide spoiler)] It's a bit of a slow burn and took me a bit to get drawn in. I generally don't read a lot of light-hearted stuff, so when I first started this book, I thought I'd have to force myself through. Turns out, given the space and the time to tell a story, this is actually a really good one. The book is told, not from Tress's point of view, but from someone witnessing the whole thing (and who is familiar to anyone who reads Cosmere books), and we get some side commentary from them about the whole thing that I appreciated. It does read very much like The Princess Bride, but with a different take on the story (and that's mentioned in the afterword). I was really into seeing how Tress would get through her next scrape, and my only real minor complaint is that maybe the tongue-in-cheek humor is laid on a bit thick in some places for my personal tastes. Still, this ended up being a really enjoyable read, and even though I guessed a part of the conclusion, there's still a lot there to be discovered. Highly recommend for Sanderson fans.
Highlights
Men often described the girl as having hair the color of wheat. Others called it the color of caramel, or occasionally the color of honey. The girl wondered why men so often used food to describe women's features. There was a hunger to such men that was best avoided.
The ocean, however, was now as you hopefully imagine it. Assuming you imagine it as emerald green, made up of spores, and bearing endless possibilities.
(Fun tip: Being told "I kept you in the dark to protect you" is not only frustrating, but condescending as well. It's a truly economical way to demean someone; if you're looking to fit more denigration into an already busy schedule, give it a try.)
Facts
Cutting apart a spore-filled flare while distracted wasn't the best of ideas--but admittedly Tress hadn't decided to be distracted. It happened naturally, like a case of the hiccups or the inevitable and relentless entropic decay of the universe.
Honestly same, Tress. I also never choose to be distracted
“You know how rich folk are—they make all this money off people sailing around, selling and buying for them. Then what're they gonna do with the money? Lock it away. What good is locked away money? Ain't nobody going to enjoy it if it's trapped in a vault with Granna's wedding ring.”
“So we've gotta take some. Inject it back into the economy, as a stimulus. To help local merchants, the small folk who are just tryin' to live. We do an important service.”
"By... stealing."
"Damn right."
I meaaaaan
Her head was full of wisdom like that: the wisdom of complaints.
Mood
Oh, right. I nearly forgot Ulaam. But seeing as he was dead, he barely counted.
Ah yes. Of course. How could he be counted?
Oh, the five senses? Yes, I said I lost my sense of taste to the Sorceress's curse. You thought... you thought I meant that sense of taste? Oh. you innocent fool.
She took my other sense of taste. The important one.
And with it went my sense of humor, my sense of decorum, my sense off purpose, and my sense of self. The last one stung the most, since it appears my sense of self is tied directly to my wit. I mean, it's in the name.
As a result, I present you with Hoid, the cabin boy.
WHO IS HE?
“I got it from a wizard a few years ago.”
"A wizard?" Tress said.
“From beyond the stars”, Fort said. “A very strange fellow. He used it to translate words to our language. I traded hard to get it. It seemed to surprise him when he realized how much it would help. It's hard for me to write the usual way for hearing people, since l can't make some of the shapes.”
That "wizard" from the stars wasn't me, by the way. I've always wondered who traded the device to Fort. That's Nalthian tech, with Awakened predictive Connection circuits.
I feel like I’m so out of my depth when I come across these references. Like I feel like I should be going “ah HA I know EXACTLY what this is about” and instead I’m just left with more questions
“Your words appear for me on the back as you speak. It can even differentiate voices, and puts a mark before them to indicate someone new is talking.”
“Wow" Tress said.
Now, you might be wondering why Fort didn't read lips. I, like many hearing people, once assumed this was the magical solution for people navigating the hearing world. But in case you haven't heard-pun intended-reading lips doesn't work like it does in stories. It's a messy business, full of guesswork, and is extremely taxing. Even for experts.
I love how inclusive this is. And he even has fingers that had been broken and were healed improperly to work around, but it’s not said negatively, just a fact of him
It was Hoid, cabin boy of the Whistlebow. There was no mistaking his gangly figure and his pure white head of hair. Though everyone called him "boy”, he appeared to be in his thirties and evidently of sound mind—until he opened his mouth.
"My gums sure do like a lickin'!" he said to her, then walked away with a bowlegged gait that made him wobble like a drunk penguin.
Yes, that's me.
No, I don't want to talk about it.
It all felt so much more real now. Was she really doing this? Had she really left her home? What were those strange colorful pigeons, and why were they talking to her?
This last part was a side effect of the poison the captain had ordered put in Tress's drink. There are, unfortunately, no talking pigeons in this story. Merely talking rats.
What the FUCK?
He smiled. The man was exactly the sort of person who thought every woman in the room was thinking about him. Which they were, as each desperately hoped he would head the other direction.
Ick
"But a terrible idea executed brilliantly has to be better than a brilliant idea executed terribly. I mean, look at pelicans."
Again, I SUPPOSE?
"Ulba, would you say our daughter is more practical than we are
"Yes, I would normally say that," Ulba said.
"And would you also say she is more thoughtful than we are?"
"She is always thinking," Tress's mother agreed.
"How often does she impose upon people or ask for what she wants"
"Almost never."
"With all that in mind, Tress's father said, "it must be the right decision for her to leave. She will have considered all other options. Leaving the island to rescue the man she loves might sound like lunacy, but if every other option has been discarded as impossible, then insanity might—in this case—be practical."
I mean I suppose
He’d put off this princess by explaining what he'd had for breakfast in intricate detail, as he’d counted the pieces of the scrambled egg and categorized them by size.
It was at this moment that the thought occurred to me that Charlie is fairly likely to be autistic
It is a great irony that society tends to look down on those who sell their bodies, but not those who lease out their minds.
Most people never live, Tress, because they're afraid is losing the years they have left... years that also will be spent not living. "
Beyond that, memories have a way of changing on us. Souring or sweetening over time—like a brew we drink, then recreate later by taste, only getting the ingredients mostly right. You can't taste a memory without tainting it with who you have become.
"I once ate an entire watermelon in one sitting," I told her. "And it gave me diarrhea."
"Doug" is the naming equivalent to convergent evolution. And once it arrives, it stays. A linguistic Great Filter; a wakeup call. Once a society reaches peak Doug, it's time for it to go sit in the corner and think about what it has done.