Goodreads Project, part 6: Fantasy
I’m working on a Goodreads project, reading a book from each of the fifteen categories Goodreads uses in its Best Book of the Year Award contest. If you click back through my last five blog entries, you can see reviews of the books I read in Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery and Thriller, Romance, and Romantasy. When I started, readers were still voting. Since then, Goodreads has announced the winners.
I’ve now reached the sixth category, Fantasy. To my surprise, I hadn’t read any of the finalists in this category. Filling a hole like this is one of the benefits of my project. I chose to read Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson.
The Story
The book is the story of Tress, who lives on an island in a sea of dangerous spores. She’s a window-washer by trade and has never imagined leaving home. Then the man she loves is taken captive, and Tress sets out to rescue him. The plot is full of twists that require Tress to grow and change. It’s not particularly tense, and I could put it down when I had to. But I always picked it up again because Tress’s company is enjoyable.
Sanderson calls the book a “grown-up fairy tale,” and it does have that tone. In some ways, the narrative voice reminds me of Neil Gaiman’s stories. Here’s an example of the description of a character: “Imagine him as the answer to the question: ‘What if that gunk from your shower drain were to come to life?'” I only gradually realized that the narrator is a character in the story. Unraveling his identity eventually becomes part of the plot.
The book is often humorous, but it treats serious, heart-felt matter. One of my favorite parts is when a tertiary character is killed, and the narrator stops to tell us more about this character, turning him into a person, rather than an anonymous red shirt.
The Book’s Background
Sanderson is a multiply-published, widely known, big-selling author. So, this book’s history surprised me.
Sanderson says the idea for this story came from watching “The Princess Bride.” His wife noted that Buttercup scarcely appeared. She wondered how the story would change in the princess was the one to set off to rescue the person she loved. That was the story’s beginning.
What I did not expect was that Sanderson originally published this book on his Kickstarter as part of a project of his own called “Secret Project.” For a long time, Sanderson and his wife were the only readers. The book eventually went to Sanderson’s regular publisher, Tor. But Kickstarter played a part.
I like secret projects. In writing, I think they’re particularly useful because they provide a place the writer can play without worrying how anyone else will judge them.
Tress of the Emerald Sea finished second in Goodreads’ Fantasy category. Leigh Bardugo’s Hell Bent finished first.
Next
Onward to Science Fiction.
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Deep as a Tomb
When the daughter of a would-be rebel and the son of the king wind up living in the same household, her secrets are threatened by his need for revenge. Murder, magic, and underground tomb mazes.
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