Tress of the Emerald Sea was a Christmas present from my sister and the first novel by Brandon Sanderson that I have read. Overall, I really enjoyed the book. It was a nice light hearted fantasy story, but with some good characters and an enjoyably unusual setting. The protagonist was delightful and Sanderson's writing just fluent enough that the constant breaking of the fourth wall was (for the most part) amusing, rather than irritating.
My only real gripes with the story were the not infrequent descents into potty humour and one or two of the characters being somewhat irritating with few redeeming features; unfortunately, the narrator was one of these, but the rest of the cast and their adventures were interesting enough to overlook this for the most part. There was one moment when I laughed out loud, but a sentence later the joke was taken too far and transformed from a wonderfully absurd failure of the narrator to talk past a geas into a 'joke' about diarrhoea being funny. The blurb on the back compares the book to The Princess Bride and, while I can see the similarities (both satires on traditional fairy tales), Tress of the Emerald Sea is definitely a tier below William Goldman's masterpiece.
Having said that, I did still really enjoy reading Tress. Sanderson seems very good at building unusual, but detailed fantasy worlds and, for the most part, the jokes were actually funny. It was nice to read a fun and low stakes fantasy novel for a change and I shall no doubt try more of Sanderson's work in the future.
