Tress of the Emerald Sea

Sanderson at his most playful: a fairy-tale voyage across seas of spores, told by a narrator who cannot resist a joke. Some readers are won over by its warmth and its heroine, and the debt to “The Princess Bride” is plain to see. Others feel the tone wavers between comic quest and earnest fable, and it reads younger than the rest of the Cosmere, so those who want his weightier epics may find themselves drifting.

Worth knowing Tress of the Emerald Sea was the first of the four novels Brandon Sanderson wrote in secret during the pandemic and announced with the Kickstarter of 2022 that raised more than forty million dollars; it came out in 2023. Tress is a window-washer’s daughter on a rock in a sea of green spores, where water makes the spores grow and a ship’s crew lives in fear of rain; when her friend Charlie, the duke’s son, is taken by the Sorceress, she leaves the island for the first time, ends up on a pirate ship and learns what spores can do. Sanderson wrote it for his wife as a Princess Bride told from Buttercup’s side, and the narrator is Hoid, under a curse that affects his wit. It is set in the Cosmere but needs none of it.

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