Tress of the Emerald Sea

Despite being part of the Cosmere, Brandon Sanderson’s shared universe, Tress of the Emerald Sea is not a typical Sanderson book: instead of an epic fantasy boasting a huge cast of characters and told in a didactic voice, we have a whimsical fairy tale with a playful narrator that focuses on the story of a single figure.

“In the middle of the ocean, there was a girl who lived upon a rock,” the novel starts, immediately framing its narrative in the realm of fairy tales. This is the story of Tress, a girl who lives in a world with talking rats, cunning dragons, cruel sorcerers, and ships that sail over clouds of spores that burst in contact with water. One day, Tress’ loved one is taken by an evil sorceress and Tress decides to venture forth into the world, leaving her small, secluded island, in search of him.

In Tress of the Emerald Sea, the narrator’s voice immediately stands out. Gone is the usual expositive, didactic, bland voice of Sanderson’s work: here, the narrator is snarky and ironic, often creating humor through their observations. Take Tress’ description on the first page, which is used to tell us about the protagonist’s features but also about her society, criticizing a specific part of it (a part that is much like ours): “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.”

It’s a voice that openly plays with words (“It might be said that Tress had a way with words. In that her words tended to get in her way”), that likes to make unusual analogies, such as comparing the image of spores bursting with the sex life of… librarians (“trust me, they’re a strange bunch”), and that usually imparts great value to everyday objects (gloves become a symbol of a relationship, while cups, a token of Tress’ want of affection). This allows for some whimsy when subverting our expectations, such as when the narrator is creating a build-up for the revelation that Tress and the Duke’s son, Charlie, are in love, and this is how it goes:

“He didn’t listen to her only because he was fascinated by the lives of peasants.

She didn’t visit only because she wanted to hear his stories.

In fact, on the deepest level, it wasn’t about cups or stories at all. It was, instead, about gloves.”

It’s also a voice filled with irony, capable of criticizing a character (and their ideology) while seemingly praising their deeds:

“The duke left on occasion to report to the king. Plus he’d earned all those fancy medals by killing people from a distant place where they looked slightly different. He’d apparently been quite heroic during those wars; you could tell because a great number of his troops had died, while he lived.”

But the beauty of the playful tone in Tress of the Emerald Sea is that it isn’t limited to the narrator, but is also transported to the world the characters inhabit. After the narrator remarks that Tress’ laugh sounds like the call of an elephant seal, Charlie makes a joke about the comparison – as if he had heard it. Later on, when the narrator decides to call all the unimportant members of a pirate’s crew “Dougs”, everyone aboard the ship will immediately begin to refer to them as that.

In other words, it’s as if the characters were in on the joke as well – it’s as if the whimsey of the narration were spilling into the world, infecting its inhabitants. When the Duke praises his nephew, for example, he employs the same twisted logic that was used to describe him before: “He’s a war hero. He lost ten thousand men in the Battle of Lakeprivy.”

Jokes and unusual analogies are reused here often and to great effect. We know how food analogies are framed in a bad light, so when the captain of a ship praises Tress’ hair by comparing it with the color of a cup of mead, the protagonist’s abrupt answer seems justified – and it also foreshadows the dark nature of the captain’s next action.

There’s a mystery around the figure of the narrator as well. We soon discover that they are a character in the novel, someone who knows Tress and is telling her story, so each sentence becomes a piece of the puzzle regarding their identity, as we try to decipher who they really are with the information they relay to us: the historical knowledge they possess, the lyricism of their voice, the people they claim to know, and so forth.

The novel also largely succeeds in creating a lighthearted atmosphere, where good deeds are rewarded and love is framed in a romantic light. During the first chapters, Charlie is a soothing presence to Tress, as the narrative focuses less on what she feels for him and more on the effect he has on her, so her feelings can be intuited by the reader: “Making decisions was easier around him – as if he were an emotional lubricant easing the machinery of the heart as it labored through difficult tasks.”

Tress herself is a great part of the book’s charm and optimism. Her most defining characteristic is her empathy, her willingness to put herself in other people’s shoes and try to understand their motivations and feelings. She’s kind even to people she’s scared of – people who may want to do her harm – and the narrative mirrors her cheerful personality, painting her actions as noble deeds instead of criticizing them in a cynical light.

One of the pirates Tress meets, Ann, is absolutely inept with guns, not only missing all of her shots, but sometimes also harming her colleagues or herself in the process. This is usually brought up as comic relief since the crew is always trying to prevent her from acquiring weapons. But Tress not only gives Ann a chance to fire a gun, but also tries to help her hit her target. The narrator, then, remarks, “Tress settled down, thinking about people and how the holes in them could be filled by such simple things, like time, or a few words at the right moment. Or, apparently, a cannonball. What, other than a person, could you build up merely by caring?”

Moving at a brisk pace, with tons of bite-sized chapters, Tress of the Emerald Sea is also unlike most of Sanderson’s work in the way that what happens in the story is much less important than how it happens: if the book manages to enchant us it is with the energy and optimism of its lead character and the whimsy of the narration.

December 08, 2023.