I know I’m a Brandon Sanderson fan, and likely to enjoy pretty much everything he writes. But his latest book Tress of the Emerald Sea is super charming and funny, with a wholesome romance plot driving the adventure… it reminded me of Stardust and The Princess Bride and maybe a bit of Terry Pratchett.
As it turns out, the catalyst for the book was watching The Princess Bride with his family and having them point out that the title character didn’t have any agency. So it was a “what if Buttercup goes off on an adventure to rescue her beloved from pirates?” With some other plot/trope reversals (as Sanderson likes to do), and in the Cosmere on a weird-ass planet, and narrated by the immortal trickster and storyteller Hoid. The narrator is very much a character, and so it almost reads more like a Hoid book than a Sanderson book. Substitute puns, sarcasm, anachronistic references, and “I’ll just call them all Doug” for the Branvalanche and the huge emotional victories and defeats. While I’m glad the Stormlight Archive isn’t told entirely in Hoid’s voice, this book was a whole lot of fun. 🙂
I wound up picking out several tracks from Jamuary; I think 16, but I forgot to turn on my cloud sync after the last session so a couple of files aren’t visible from work. They’re all mastered and have names. It turns out there’s a common thread to the style, as if I had done that on purpose, and I really like it, so I used that as my final criteria for choosing what to include. We’re going on a trip later this week but I should be able to release it maybe tonight or tomorrow. No reason to rush, it just it would be nice to launch right into new stuff and bass practice after returning from the trip.