Tag Archives: Beginner Fantasy

#WyrdAndWonder2025 Day 9 – A Fantastic Voyage: Tress of the Emerald Sea

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So far this May, I’ve been alternating between my regularly scheduled posts (see last week’s review of BRZRKR Bloodlines Volume 1), and #WyrdAndWonder themed topics as well. Today, the two are happily combined, as the book I was planning to review anyway — Brandon Sanderson’s Tress of the Emerald Sea — fits perfectly with the day’s prompt: Fantastic Voyages.

If you’re unsure what I mean by #WyrdAndWonder, I’ve given a brief explanation in my last themed post on Day 4 – Five Fantasy Favorites: Creatures from Nautical Myth and Folklore, but it’s essentially a month long celebration of the Fantastic, whether it be books, movies, art, or whatever else. And if you’re interested in participating, or just really want ALL the details, please see the Chart a Course for Wyrd And Wonder post over on Onemore.org.

In any case, it feels like I’m about a solid two years late to reading Tress, but I actually think that may have been helpful to my enjoyment of the book, rather than a hinderance. Last I had read anything by Brandon Sanderson, I had just finished up The Lost Metal and was, in a way, grieving the end of an era.

In that review, I mention how The Lost Metal kinda cracks open the Cosmere in a way we really haven’t seen yet, and one of the big ways it does so is the introduction of Aethers. Mostly, we’re still firmly in Allomancy country, but I believe the little bit of Aether magic we do see was meant to somehow prepare us for the world of Tress. I almost feel like Sanderson may have got it wrong, and I wished I would have read Tress first, as it would have made so much of Lost Metal make a bit more sense. However, from reading this book’s afterword and just generally following the press around The Secret Projects, I kinda get the impression Tress was kinda an accident, and so perhaps a little slack is warranted . . . also I just don’t know how you’d ever manage to reveal things in the correct order in a series as long as the Cosmere.

However it could have happened, or should have happened, Tress ended up being a really enjoyable read for me, though one that sort of grew on me (not unlike a verdant vine) slowly.

The first big pill to swallow is the setting, and this one goes down pretty easy. A sea of spores (green, crimson and midnight), fluidization, giant ship-breaking vines and crystals, some absurd number of moons . . . Sanderson really feels like he’s batting for the fences on this world and letting his imagination run wild. And the results are stunning. There were several points during the novel which I had to let myself pause and just really try to imagine what things must have looked like. I was in awe every time. And I felt like this visual quality really was enhanced by the leatherbound edition I was reading which is just stunning as well.

I’d say the next really noticeable thing we come up against is Tress’s narrator, the (by now) infamous Hoid. This aspect of the novel didn’t thrill me at first. I’m usually a big fan of witty narrators, but for some reason I didn’t take to Hoid immediately. Though Sanderson’s love of Terry Pratchett is well documented — he once wrote that Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Might be the Highest Form of Literature on the Planet — Tress was the first novel I’ve read from Sanderson where I felt Pratchett’s influence at the level of prose.

Note: I have a whole lot more to say about Pratchett’s influence on the Mistborn books, specifically Wax and Wayne, but that has become a bit of a project. I’ll update this post here if I ever write it up.

It’s felt mostly through Hoid being clever and saying things like:

“It might be said that he had a way with words. In that his words often got away.” pg 13.

To me, this actually is a funny and clever line; however, it’s quickly followed by another, and then another, and so on for pretty much the entirety of the book. And while individual jokes and quips may have been enjoyable, its pervasiveness throughout the story felt wholly unnecessary. Simply put, Tress’s story is interesting enough without all the ornamentation.

We’re only on page eight when one of the more awkward attempts at wit is made, in a description of the main character no less. Take the following lines:

“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”

I’ve written about Sanderson’s use — and attempts at recompense for using — the Not Like Other Girls trope on this blog before, most notably in my review of The Bands of Mourning (Deep or Dated). Now, I say this with the complete bias of a white man in his mid-thirties:

Leave. It. Alone.

Want to write a story about a humble unassuming girl who goes on a big grandiose adventure which flies in the face of genre convention in regards to gender norms? Great! Tell that story. Tress is the perfect opportunity. As the Nike slogan goes: Just Do It!

But calling attention to it through one of Hoid’s only moderately humorous asides only lessens its power.

Now astute readers might have noticed that I said Hoid’s narration didn’t thrill me at first, but eventually it did grow on me, and by the end I was happy I stuck it through. Ironically, it’s because Hoid (as narrator) also has a bit of an arc as the story progresses, growing more introspective as the story nears its end. This allows for some of the more interesting lines in the book, the first being:

“The ship fell quiet — but it wasn’t the quiet of a night of falling snow. It was the quiet of a hospital room after a loved one has died.” – pg 364

Now I’m not sure about the second sentence, but it’s the “. . . a night of falling snow.” that had my antennae twitching. I assume this is in reference to the event Sanderson writes about in his April 4th, 2023 blog post Outside.

I found this interesting because I’d always assumed that post had gone up as a response to the “hit piece” from WIRED magazine entitled Brandon Sanderson is Your God which posted on March 23, 2023. Now I’m sure that piece influenced Outside‘s final form (he makes references to misconceptions by journalists in the post), but given Tress‘s copyright date of January 2023, it seems Sanderson had been thinking more about the event for other reasons as well.

The next line that really stuck out to me comes when Tress is captured and about to be bargained away to the dragon Xisis (yup there be dragons here too). The line says:

“Could a day have too many moments? Yes, the hours and minutes had been the same today as every day, but each of the moments inside had been fat, like a wineskin filled to bursting. Tress felt as if she were going to leak it all out, vomit emotion all over the place — there wasn’t enough Tress to contain it.” – pg 368

This stood out to me as just being so prescient, both back while it was written during the pandemic, and also every day we’ve managed to endure post-pandemic. Big moods here.

Finally, I’ll bring up the dragon again, Xisis. I really enjoyed this scene as it felt — despite not being all that similar in the specifics — like something you might have found in The Hobbit. I think Tress has been, and will be, a lot of burgeoning readers’ first experience with Fantasy (and especially Cozy Fantasy), so the scene just felt right in that context, whether it was meant as an homage or not (I don’t really have any evidence to prove either way).

So Give ‘Tress of the Emerald Sea‘ a read?

Yes! Despite my annoyance with Hoid’s narration, Tress of the Emerald Sea is still a fantastic voyage (ayy now were back on theme), and generally a joy to read. As Cosmere books go, I would say it’s THEE starting point for Aether magic (despite seeing Aethers in other books), and has (probably) a lot of other implications for the interconnected story of the world hoppers (there are several in this book).

I especially recommend this one to first-time Fantasy readers because of the real sense of wonder to be held imagining the (colorful) world, and the sense of (high-seas) adventure taking place despite its non-traditional ocean. For long-time Fantasy readers, there’s a lot here you’ll recognize from other beloved Fantasies, and that is often its own reason to read!

That’s all I have for this time. What are your thoughts? Would you be able to stand an entire novel narrated by Stormlight’s Wit? What do you make of the book’s connection to Outside?
Which Cosmere books are your favorite?

Please leave your thoughts in the comments and thanks for reading (this was a long one). I look forward to talking about this one!

Happy #WyrdAndWonder!

“Impossible Creatures” vs Impossible Expectations: A Measured Take on Katherine Rundell’s Middle Grade Epic

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I’ll be curious to see what — if any — medals this book wins as 2024/25 awards start going out. My initial instinct was that it wouldn’t really have a shot at a Hugo (the one award I sorta keep up with) as it’s not really for the right audience but some googling shows that Harry Potter And the Goblet of Fire took a rocket in 2001, and Coraline did also in 2003, meaning books written for younger audiences are perhaps as likely to win as anything else.

What I can tell you, is this book had the marketing team behind it. I’m not sure if it was just one source spamming my inbox or if the book really is everywhere, but in the run up to its release, it seemed like it was all Impossible Creatures, all the time. Mostly I feel like the books that I end up reading come to me through other sources (award winners, recs from friends, authors I’m already interested in, random niches I’m curious about, stuff I just happen to see as I’m shelving books at work), and so I’m aware of whatever the big publishers (in this case Knopf) are pushing, but I don’t always get to it.

But I happened to see one comparison in the headline of a Washington Post article which (as click-baity as I knew it was) I couldn’t ignore. I’ll reveal the headline and discuss the comparison later on, but I want to get some of my own thoughts down first before delving into the rest.

This book is good, potentially great, but a far cry from the “instant classic” it’s purported to be. Where the book is strongest is (thankfully) in its premise, the impossible creatures. Longma, Griffin, Lavellan, Mermaid; the book is a veritable who’s who of mythic tradition including all your western favorites — Dragons, Centaurs, Unicorns etc. — but also a whole heap of other creatures which are likely not as well known to traditional fantasy audiences. Creatures like the Al-miraj, or the Karkadann (though the Karkadann featured briefly in the Daevabad books).

The inclusion of such disparate mythic traditions accomplishes a few things: 1) it prompts the reader to investigate and familiarize themselves with a wide and diverse group of legends and cultural heritage (a plus in my book) and 2) it lends itself to the overall sense of wonder, which I would say this book has in droves.

This general sense of awe the reader feels while reading is probably the book’s second biggest strength. The Archipelago — the hidden secondary world accessible to our world through random portals in which all this fantasy can live and thrive — is just jammed full of marvels, some large, but many small. Since most of the fun of reading this book is just being stunned by what you’re seeing, I won’t give away any more examples (after all no spoilers), but I greatly appreciated the effort which went into giving each page just a tiny bit of magic to hold on to.

Despite everything I’ve just written, I struggled with this book in many places, most of which probably had more to do with editorial than anything else. Take a look at the following passage:

” ‘Sorry?‘ The larger man breathed hard and angry on them, and his breath had whiskey on it.”

You can breathe hard, and be angry while you do it, but I’m not sure you can breathe angry (though I suppose if Nick Cage can Drive Angry lol). For any wondering (and this will probably ruin my point) the next sentence was:

“Sorry is for farting near the fruit bowl, girl!”

Which is perhaps one of the funniest things I’ve read this year.

In any case, I had many hang ups like this which caused me to stop and try to decipher what I’d just read. Often it was the type of thing I’ve written about above, but just as often it was convoluted sentence structure. Some word choices I was trying to chalk up to being for a British rather than American audience, but when one of the characters gives a “slither” of a smile instead of a sliver of one, I knew that we just hadn’t had enough eyes on it before the book went to publication.

Now I’m sure there is an argument to be made that in a Fantasy book about dragons and centaurs which is written for nine-year-olds (and above), perhaps we can’t and even shouldn’t expect poetry from every single line. But I would almost argue it’s MORE important that we model great writing for younger audiences. They’re not going to be bored by it. They can handle more than you think.

(Also, there were plenty of words in this book which were clearly only included as ‘vocabulary builders’ — which I think is a trend in books written for this age range — so why worry about if something will be hard for young readers while at the same time adding in elements which are intentionally hard)

We’re starting to get into the weeds here, and I still want to touch on the WaPo headline, so I’ll mention only two more critiques, both of which are a little larger in scope than individual lines of prose. The first has to do with a main character’s death. To avoid spoilers, I won’t say which one, but I will say that it felt completely pointless. Or rather that the point was too clear. The only reason this character had to go, was because the author wrote too compelling a reason for the other MC’s not to finish the main quest and needed a big emotional event to get everything started again.

This is not an uncommon trope, and there are plenty of examples where it works just fine, but the more I see it, the more I view it as kind of lazy and in its worst iterations, legitimately harmful (think “fridging” and please read Cathrynne M. Valente’s Refrigerator Monologues). Personally, I felt the stakes of saving the world were plenty high to compel the quest to continue, but apparently we needed just a little extra push, and for me, it was just a little push too far. The whole thing felt pointless and for the rest of the book I felt mad when I think I was supposed to feel sad.

My final critique is that there seemed to be frequent portions of this book where one of the main characters just seems to forget they can more or less fly. Of course if they had remembered, all the tension in the scene would have fled with them, but it was frustrating to say the least. Perhaps a more observant reader will be able to point out that no, they actually couldn’t fly because of X condition, or Y limitation, but I feel if readers are asked to stop and perform this kind of calculus during a scene, there needs to be a different (ahem better) scene.

Alright, let’s talk about this Washington Post headline. It reads: “Katherine Rundell is her generation’s J.R.R. Tolkien“

Bold. And ultimately misleading. A claim which sets an impossible expectation for the book to live up to no matter how good it truly is (please note: I completely understand Rundell has probably zero control over what WaPo writes so at this point I’m not critiquing her or the book, I’m basically shouting at clouds).

I could easily compare this book to Harry Potter, or Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Comparison to the Song of the Lioness might fit, but perhaps the story’s best comparison (as it is essentially a portal fantasy) would probably be something more like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

But the The Hobbit? Lord of the Rings? Aside from living in the same genre (Fantasy), featuring dragons, and (ostensibly) being written for children, it is hard to see what connects the stories together, and it feels entirely too soon to predict that Impossible Creatures will have the same impact as Tolkien’s frankly enormous body of work.

Now if we actually read the article — always an important step before rage-posting a response — we’ll understand that the comparison has more to do with Rundell’s career, her fellowship at Oxford, and her academic work. The article IS about Impossible Creatures, but the headline is . . . not so much. I don’t know much of Tolkien’s biography so I’m not really in a position to judge the accuracy of this comparison. I’ll take the article’s author at their word (though after such a misleading headline I have very little trust left lol)

No doubt this is an incredible accolade for the author, but it is one that I think, unfortunately, sets the wrong expectations for a book which, seems to be a smash hit all on its own (#19 in Children’s Fantasy on Amazon as of December 2024).

Give Impossible Creatures a Read?

Yes, despite my very long-winded rant, this book is quite enjoyable (even after all my various critiques). It shines in its essential conceit, the impossible creatures, and succeeds in giving the reader some sense of awe and wonder on every page, whether its a fantastic new setting, or a small but marvelous detail. The prose were sometimes difficult to decipher, and I often wondered how well the plot would hold up under a truly focused microscope; however, as it is, I still greatly enjoyed this journey and am generally anxious for my next adventure in The Archipelago.

I hope this review was able to deliver a sort of even keel for what to expect before starting. I think my own experience was unfortunately somewhat tainted by the coverage I was seeing (in WaPo specifically) and I may have enjoyed this book more if I hadn’t had things like “instant classic” and “this generation’s Tolkien” floating around in my mind while reading.

That’s all I have for you this week. Thanks for reading until the end! Has anyone already read this one? What is your favorite impossible creature? Please leave your thoughts in the comments! I’m excited to talk about this one!

Until next time . . .