Review Detail

What I Loved: It has taken two other books, but we finally come to Tamsin’s story and finally learn the secret that drove her relentlessly to be the best in this third installment of the Glittering Court, The Emerald Sea.
Once again, the beginning of the book starts back at the beginning of the Glittering court girls meeting each other. This one also zooms forward pretty fast since we are already familiar with events. Adelaide and Tamsin’s falling out allows for Tamsin’s story to veer off into events we don’t know much earlier than in Mira’s story.
Tamsin has many trials when her ship is wrecked in a storm leaving the girls far to the north. Through the kindness of strangers, the fearsome Icori end up not being as scary as tales of them would lead people to believe. They help the stranded Glittering court girls and ship crew to an Osfridian colony of Grashond. The Grashond settlers agree to help them make it to Cape Triumph, but they all have to wait till the winter blizzards pass for the year. They insist the girls live by their religious standards of hard work, prayer, and homely dress.
Things go downhill for Tamsin when a local lady becomes jealous of her catching the attention of the young priest, Gideon.
Her increasing censure leads Tamsin to a locked room of punishment where she is given no bed or blanket in the cold room and only one slice of bread and water a day.
Tamsin finally breaks out and escapes the town with the help of the trader, Jago Robinson. Through many additional events, she ends up in Cape Triumph as we learned in the other books, took on a new fiancé, and was lost again at sea presumed dead.
In this book, we learned what happened once she was pushed from the boat by the treasonous Warren Doyle.
This book also wraps up all the plots of treason that the other two books had incorporated as well. All secrets are revealed and all ladies have their happily ever after.
Final Verdict: I enjoyed many of the details in Tamsin’s story. I did think there were a lot of extra details between her escaping Grashond and her getting her happily ever after that was a bit tedious at times. It played well in tying in all the ways the treason was discovered and that plotline getting wrapped up. All the books in the trilogy had two plots, their love story and the treason that left all of them to feel a bit long and sidetracked at times.