After the very melancholy "Never Let Me Go" I needed a pick-me-up, and turned to the first of Brandon Sanderson's Kickstarter novels: Tress of the Emerald Sea.
It was a great little standalone novel! A little Young-Adult for my usual tastes, but for an audiobook I can't think of anything more comforting than a Sanderson novel read by Michael Kramer (and / or Kate Reading). It's like a big bowl of pho -- you know what you're going to get; there may be a couple small surprises but you're guaranteed feel warm and full afterward.
I try to take something away from everything I read, and from this one I glinted a hint of how to make characters lovable. The book's particularly sassy / sarcastic narrator has a way of humanizing characters that you didn't particularly care about extremely quickly via goofiness. In one particular instance, a nameless character dies, and the narrator quickly tells us that fallen character's name and some silly story about their strange beliefs, and suddenly you're a little sad they're dead.
The tone of the book is very humorous so it's easy for these kinds of jokey situations to come up, but I think back to the JRPGs of my youth and this was similarly used, especially with super-serious characters, to make them more likable. A trip or failure to communicate is a super quick way to endear a character to readers / players.
Anyways, Tress was a nice fun light read with a neat little world and lovable characters. Now I'm ready for some more heavy shit.