“A young woman from a remote island sets out across treacherous spore seas to rescue the boy she loves from a sorceress.”
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Tress of the Emerald Sea is Brandon Sanderson's 2023 standalone Cosmere novel, the first of the Year of Sanderson surprise novels published after his 2022 Kickstarter campaign. The setting is the Cosmere planet Lumar, whose oceans are made of treacherous magical spores rather than water. Tress is a young woman from the remote island of Diggen's Point who has lived a small but contented life until the local duke's son Charlie is taken by the Sorceress of Midnight Sea. Tress sets out to rescue him. The novel is structured as a Princess Bride-style adventure with a deliberately fantastical narrator (the Hoid character familiar to Cosmere readers).
What makes Tress work as more than fan service is Sanderson's choice to write it in a different register from his usual project. The Princess Bride influence is overt; Tress is a Buttercup who has more agency, and the novel uses Hoid as William Goldman used the narrator in the source novel. The spore-sea magic system is one of the more inventive Cosmere magics, and Sanderson's project of building one shared universe across all his fantasy continues to pay off in small ways across this novel.
Recommended for Cosmere readers who want a standalone novel that does not require the larger continuity (you can read Tress without having read any other Sanderson), for fans of Princess Bride-style adventures (Mary Robinette Kowal's The Spare Man, Travis Baldree's Legends & Lattes), and for readers looking for books like Tress of the Emerald Sea in the gentle-fantasy-adventure register. Four stars and the best of the Year of Sanderson standalones.
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