Audio book length: 12 hrs 27 mins
Rating: 4.5 stars
Buzzword Cover Challenge 25: Celestial (there is a big moon and several stars on the cover)
What if in The Princess Bride, Buttercup didn't sit at home and mourn for Westley when he was captured by pirates, but instead went off to try to rescue him? Of course, that would mean Buttercup had any agency at all in either the novel or the film, and she really doesn't. But if Buttercup was a young woman named Tress, from a barren and fairly desolate island, who washes windows at the duke's mansion and collects cups, with the only thing making her life worthwhile being her friendship with the duke's son (who pretends to be a gardener), and one day, Charlie, her best friend (who she's only recently discovered that she's also in love with) is taken away by his father to be married off (a poor window washer girl is not a suitable match for him)? Charlie promises to be so dreadfully boring to every suitable bride he meets that no one will want to marry him, and every time is rejected by another bride, he will write to her and send her another cup from his travels.
However, after some months, the letters stop coming. Then the duke returns, but Charlie isn't with him. Charlie has been kidnapped by the Sorceress, and it doesn't seem like anyone cares except Tress. First, she needs to figure out how to get off the island (no one but the duke's family is ever allowed to leave). On the first ship she travels on, she meets a talking rat, who she takes with her when the ship is attacked by pirates. It's important to note that in this world, while there are ships and long voyages, the oceans are made up of spores that react very violently to the presence of any liquids. Very occasionally, the spore currents still for a time, and it's possible for brave, or exceedingly foolish, individuals to walk along on top of the spores. This is how Tress gets from the attacked ship onto the pirate vessel, where she gradually befriends more of the crew and works her way up in rank, despite the misgivings of the blood-thirsty pirate captain.
Tress isn't entirely sure how she's going to help the motley crew of pirates from becoming exploited by their captain, and persuade them that they really want to assist her in travelling across the Crimson Sea to the Midnight Sea (the two most dangerous areas on the planet), and face the terrifying Socreress to rescue the boy she loves. But she knows that if she gives up, Charlie has no one coming for him, and that is unacceptable to her.
This is an adventure story with a plucky heroine, who keeps succeeding against all odds, sometimes because she just won't quit.While Tress has had a sheltered and rather uneventful life until she decides to leave the safety of her home to go off and rescue Charlie, she's not stupid, and her determination to get to him makes her face challenges that would make others quake. Occasionally, her lack of experience also makes her less afraid of dangers than she probably should be, since she just doesn't realise what the consequences of the potential threats. She's also kind-hearted and determined to help those who show her kindness along the way, even if it might delay her ultimate goal of getting to the Sorceress.
This is the first of the four secret projects that Brandon Sanderson announced that he wrote when he suddenly had a lot of extra downtime during the Pandemic. While most of us binged TV shows and perfected our sourdough loaves, Sanderson apparently wrote four entire novels, in addition to all the work he was already contracted for. The man is a machine! This led to probably the biggest Kickstarter campaign in history. Sanderson started writing this story for his wife, after wondering what The Princess Bride could have been like if the heroine wasn't just a passive player, having the plot happen to her.
I didn't have the finances to get all four secret projects in hardback (not only did the books themselves cost quite a lot, but the shipping to Norway was incredibly expensive), so I only got Tress of the Emerald Sea and Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, because these two books were the ones that looked the prettiest and most interesting to me. I did get digital and audio copies of all the other books, though, which allowed me to listen to parts of this in audiobook as well.
Most of Sanderson's many many novels fit into a larger fictional universe called the Cosmere. That means that a lot of his books are vaguely interconnected. Since this book fits into the Cosmere, but there are more than twenty other works that come before it, I had this grand plan last year, to do a re-read of the Sanderson novels I had read (most of them a very long time ago now) and catch up on all the ones I hadn't read, so I'd be able to properly enjoy the various secret projects, and not be confused by the references. Sadly, this failed almost at the first hurdle, when I had finished the brilliant Mistborn, and then just couldn't get past the opening chapters of The Well of Ascencion, the next book in the series. Then this got selected as the February read in The Dark Corner, my real life book club, and it became clear that I was just going to have to ignore references to events or characters from other Cosmere books.
One such character is Hoid, who narrates the story of Tress and Charlie to us readers. He has apparently appeared in a bunch of Sanderson's novels (some of which I have read, if the wiki article I read is correct - and I don't see why it wouldn't be) in various different guises. In this book, he's a cabin boy who has been cursed by The Sorceress (who is also a character from the wider Cosmere universe) becaue of a bet. He speaks and behaves nonsensically for much of the story because of this curse. Some of the members in my bookclub found the way the story was told (Hoid frequently breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the reader) incredibly annoying. The 2-3 people who didn't like the book cited Hoid's storytelling style and all three felt it wanted to be Pratchett, but didn't succeed.
Most people, however, really liked the book, and since this was our February choice, we had a very interesting discussion about whether this could be classed as a romance, or whether it was more accurately a love story. The general consensus was that Tress' love for Charlie is completely central to the plot, it's the force that drives her to change her life and leave the island, it's what keeps her going even when things seem almost impossible, and that the book wouldn't work without the love story at its centre. We also agreed that if the book had been sold to us as a great romance, we would probably have been disappointed.
Personally, I didn't find Hoid all that annoying, and very much like when I was reading To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, I decided to just enjoy the story on its own terms, and ignore any references that went over my head. Knowing that this was at least in part inspired by The Princess Bride (one of my favourite films, and books, I had fun seeing the many ways in which the story resembled, or subverted the plot of that story.
As always, Sanderson's world building and approach to magic systems is fantastic, and even the ones who didn't like the book that much had to admit that the oceans of spores idea was great. If anything, there was quite a bit of grumbling because the book claimed there were twelve different kinds of spores, and we only got to learn about five of them in-story. The characters were interesting, and even the Pirate Captain, who by some could be seen as villainous, had very clear motivations and it was made obvious why she might have chosen to act as she did. Some of the bookclub members highlighted her as one of their favourite characters,
Reading Sanderson again did remind me that his writing has always worked for me, and gave me further motivation to actually continue my "Reading the Cosmere" project this year. I'm not going to try to give myself a set time limit this time, that clearly did NOT work, and he has such a big back catalogue of mostly very long books, but I do want to revisit some of the ones I read in the past, and continue the various series. The people who love Sanderson, love him SO much. I'm trying to focus on quality over quantity in my reading now, and not get freaked out if I don't get to read a set number of books per year, but rather focus on the things I read being enjoyable.
Finally, I wanted to end this review by mentioning how utterly gorgeous my Kickstarter-funded hardback is. It is illustrated throughout, with some beatiful drawings, and, as I discovered as I got further through the book, colour coded to which of the seas Tress finds herself at the time. When she travels the Emerald sea, the chapter headings and page numbers are in a beautiful green, when she travels into the Crimson sea, the colours change to red, and then to inky black when she crosses into the dreaded Midnight sea. Having such a pretty edition of the book makes the exorbitant cost of shipping sting slightly less.
Judging a book by its cover: My hardback is a lovely, clothbound book with different textures for the patterns of the various elements of the cover. As far as I can tell, most of the editions of this book feature Tress and some varation on a giant moon on the cover, but I think this is one of the prettiest versions.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read.
