reading tress of the emerald sea
“leaving didn’t feel exciting. it felt heavy. every child looked forward to the day when they could choose a different path from the one their parents were on. tress sincerely hoped she hadn’t decided on one that led straight off a cliff.”
this was my fourth book of january, though technically my third finished. before this, i had attempted to read hiromi kawakami's the nakano thrift shop, but i couldn't bring myself to continue it for whatever reason. my designated reading time is typically right before bed — so when i'm immersed in a good read, i find myself staying up much later than i should & hiding my kindle against my chest to smother the light whenever i hear my mom stirring. but with nakano thrift shop, i kept falling asleep. that should have been a red flag to me. it took me 3 weeks to get through 28% of the book. i maybe should have dropped it earlier, as i promised i would try to, but it's okay. maybe i'm finally realizing i don't do well with human-drama type fiction, especially ones lacking in those small doses of fantasy and magical realism. i don't think i'll give up on the genre as a whole just yet. i think just need to find the right book for me.
i did give up on the book though and decided to read tress instead. what a WORLD of difference that made for me. i sped through it in a single sitting, notwithstanding the indescribable nausea from a day trip to tagaytay for my sister's birthday. i'd been immediately drawn into brandon sanderson's world and i couldn't stop reading! granted, he is one of my favorite authors. i have loved him for years and i’ve never been disappointed. (a special thank you to my brother for introducing him to me via the stormlight archive, and also for backing his kickstarter and sending me all his books).
he is so gifted at writing incredible, unique settings, and this really shines through here! i now realize this may have been what i wanted from this is how to lose the time war. i feel like i might care more about the worlds inside books rather than the people that live in them. i don't understand why, just yet, but i think it is just because i tend to be a little self-centered. it's why i like self-insert fanfiction so much. LOL. i spend a lot of time daydreaming about what it would be like to exist in my favorite stories. i have countless ocs that are too shameful to put up on toyhouse. (of course they are always over-powered and always beloved by the main characters and villains.)
though even then, i do love sanderson's characters as well. here, tress is just a fun heroine to follow. i loved her and her cups, her cleverness, her courage. she’s uninterested in leaving her home (an island in the emerald-spore sea, described and named literally as a rock) until literally forced to when her love interest is caught and held captive by the sorceress — so, stupidly and recklessly, she goes to save him. like with most hero’s journeys, she’s thrust out of her comfort zone, away from her family & finds a new one.
the book is written from hoid’s perspective, a mysterious, recurring character in the cosmere. by sanderson’s admission, he is still searching for hoid’s voice & it does show. it’s cringe at times. i’m sorry. so i wasn’t a fan of the prose, especially compared to previous works. it definitely leans more into feeling like a YA novel in its delivery, but it wasn’t a dealbreaker for me. i still enjoyed it! especially every time it nodded towards existing magic system conventions in his other books. it felt like he was winking at me & we were sharing an inside joke. a little thing between just the two of us. a nod and acknowledgement.
on other things i loved; since i'm always looking for things to pillage for my d&d campaign.
- the seethe and the stilling. the walk across the verdant sea to the crow’s song. the doggedness to cling, overboard. the refusal to die!
- the deadrunner-crew. sanderson has always been so good at writing found-family. i think so fondly even now of bridge four in the way of kings. the arrival of hope and the sharing of a meal are always turning points.
- the loopholes in hoid’s curse. so fun trying to turn it over in my own head, to try and solve it before i’m told the solution.
- xisis, the dragon under the sea. i feel like i’ve read or seen this sequence before, somewhere else, but it’s not coming to me at the moment.
- the twist!!!! :)
because i read through it so quickly & because i was also bordering on tipsy while i was reading, i do feel like i’ll revisit this again this year. i’ll come back if there’s anything else i want to say. for now, i will leave it at this: for my third book of the year, i think it's already one of my favorites for 2024. i'm probably going to take the time and get through my backlog of all the other kickstarter releases, since i haven't read any of them save for this. i had a lot of fun with this book, so i definitely have high hopes!
lines i loved:
- “in short, tress was a normal teenage girl. she knew this because the other girls often mentioned how they weren’t like “everyone else,” and after a while tress figured that the group “everyone else” must include only her. the other girls were obviously right, as they all knew how to be unique—they were so good at it, in fact, that they did it together.” — a silly way to end up where you started. still cringe. but i’ll accept it.
- “you can’t taste a memory without tainting it with who you have become.”
- “one of the great tragedies of life is knowing how many people in the world are made to soar, paint, sing, or steer—except they never get the chance to find out.”
words i loved:
- corpulent — (of a person) fat.