In The Sunlit Man, Canticle is a small planet with deadly sunlight. It’s so weird I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to understand how a world like that holds together. The story pulled me back instead to Nomad and Rebeke as they learn their place in a larger conflict and its history. It happened in each of Brandon Sanderson’s Secret Projects set in the Cosmere, the universe many of his novels share. He crowdfunded four Secret Projects on Kickstarter. I read the three Cosmere ones this summer. Each builds a world worth exploring and tells a bland story in it. I’d read them for the worlds.
The world of Tress of the Emerald Sea has some really weird behaviours, the spore seas most of all. The spores rain from twelve moons. Water makes them burst into growth, which turns every crossing into a hazard. Yumi and the Nightmare Painter has a great world build of its own, where Yumi calls spirits by stacking stones and Nikaro paints away nightmares.
Two of the three protagonists act younger than their books need. The Sunlit Man makes a point of Nomad’s age, yet he reads to me as immature and not self-aware. His sense of morality keeps pulling against his wish to stay detached. I guess that makes him a hypocrite. Nikaro is another brooding lead who needs to stop being adolescent. Yumi develops well, while Nikaro has to catch up for the ending to work. It somehow does. Her growth and a nice romance make Yumi the best of the three.
Tress runs on rails. When a sorceress takes Charlie, the boy she loves, Tress goes to sea after him. She works out a captain’s motives only after the plot has already used them, so her reasoning reads as a logical retrofit. It’s a fun journey with too much deus ex machina for my taste.
Sanderson has done better in this universe. I read Elantris and Mistborn: The Final Empire without knowing they were Cosmere books and never needed to. Both were amazing. These three put the Cosmere in the foreground, which left me wanting more of the worlds and less of the story at hand. They’re also most of my Cosmere reading. I may be missing what someone who has read more of it finds in them.