Book Review: Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson

Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The future of the Cosmere is filled with travel between worlds in both the Physical and Cognitive Realms in spaceships with two major powers developing a cold war and creating proxy empires with less worlds. Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson returns to First from the Sun—aka Drominad—to find former trader Dusk looking for meaning in his life and finding it in trying to save his people from being oppressed by visitors from the stars and then meets a dragon that is trying to do right by her ship’s crew.

Instead of forcing readers to find the novella Sixth of the Dusk to learn of Dusk’s story before this book, Sanderson wove the novella into the first part of the book as flashbacks to Dusk’s present. As someone that had read the novella I wasn’t necessarily upset by this decision by Sanderson as it allowed him to avoid an info dump for non-novella readers that needed to be caught up. Set in the future of the Cosmere, Sanderson shows off how the various magical systems on various worlds have been engineered towards technology and the creation of ships for both space travel and traveling in the Cognitive Realm. To that end, Sanderson introduces Starling, a dragon trapped in her human form, leading a crew of misfits of an debt-ridden cargo ship in search of a extremely thin chance of hope to get a break by attempting to find a potentially unknown Perpendicularity only to find the soldiers of Malwish Empire, of Scadrial, having potentially found it first though as soon as Starling and her crew arrive so does Dusk, who navigated the Cognitive Realm in a little boat after finding a new way of navigating in the Cognitive Realm. And this is only the first half of the book, how the three interact with one another and attempt to figure out the importance of a small island guarded by a huge 100-foot anti-Investiture snakelike monster. Overall, Sanderson creates a fascinating future look at the Cosmere with several callbacks to other books and series while also making a long-time reader want to see how things developed from where certain worlds left off when last I read them.

Isles of the Emberdark is the fifth Secret Project book by Brandon Sanderson that returns to the tale of Dusk on First of the Sun while introducing the dragon Starling whose own journey is just beginning within the Cosmere.