Book Club: Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson
For our inaugural book club episode, we begin with a book but the top fantasy author, Brandon Sanderson.
While Sanderson is known for epic worlds with thousand-plus-page books and series that you can sink into, Tress of the Emerald Sea is relatively approachable at an easy 384 pages as a standalone work. We selected Tress for this reason. If you’ve never read a Sanderson novel (as is the case for one of our hosts), this provides an easy entry point to his worlds. But if you’re a long-time Cosmere fan, Tress’s story gives you a quick bite of his world with special breadcrumbs sprinkled throughout.
The podcast episode dives into Sanderson’s world-building, hard vs soft magic, women in fantasy, his unique ability to create characters, and recommendations for reading more of his books if you enjoyed Tress.