When I began this book, I was not sold on the first few chapters. The style was a little too – overly smarmy asides, self-satisfied attempts at humor – I was annoyed by the cliched characters and benign but still smug silliness. And then my hometown, Los Angeles, caught fire, and my family evacuated early one morning, and my entire feeling toward it changed.
I read this book over three days while waiting for my phone to tell me which of my friends had lost everything. I cannot imagine anything else being so perfectly far from reality, engaging, and light-hearted. What had felt trite and smug morphed to safe and self-aware. Tress of the Emerald Sea was far from challenging, always optimistic, and full of surprisingly wise sentiments:
“[Tress] just felt so bare, like a broom worn by good work, down to its last few bristles. Following the tension of the day, she found it difficult to summon more fear.”
My gosh, I feel like an exhausted broom.
This was a lovely book. Stick with it, ignore Hoid for the first few chapters, and enjoy.