Standing outside the Cosmere...
...asking myself if I want to do this much heavy lifting.
The third Sanderson Kickstarter book dropped last month, I just got around to finishing it yesterday. It was fine, I gave it three stars—it was better than the second book, but I preferred Tress to this one.
This’ll be a short review because I don’t have much to say about Yumi in particular. I think the world was cool and Sanderson is good at weaving something out of original concepts. There was a very firm anime feeling to it as well. I listened to the audiobook, which had descriptions of the illustrations. I’m sure those are wonderful to see.
If I have any reservations about it, it’s that these Cosmere tie-in books seem heavily reliant on the Cosmere itself, and the heavy-gravity black hole at the center of it is the Stormlight series, which caused me to tap out in 2017 under the crushing power of the third book. How much effort do I want to invest in this thing? I found some of the Warhammer books to be similarly daunting, but the “way in” for that world is that it’s all established, and we’re just getting little pocket stories here and there in the timeline.
The idea of repeatedly subjecting myself to 1,200-page leviathans so that I can understand every tiny piece of minutiae is just too much. I read too broadly to allow my attention and time to be capitalized on by one single IP, and that’s what the Cosmere is. It almost feels like you can’t fully be involved in the Cosmere and really be involved in anything else.
That’s my take, anyway. These little one-off adventures are good, sure. They’re also littered with references to things I don’t know or don’t understand because I haven’t read the last two Stormlight books or Ars Arcanum collections.
We’ll see what the fourth book brings us. So far the first book, Tress of the Emerald Sea, remains the most entertaining, despite being narrated by Hoid, who—brutal honesty here—is too much like your smug, annoying uncle who nobody has sat down and told is not that funny.