Review by beckyyreadss - The Priory of the Orange Tree

You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.

beckyyreadss 's review for:

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

4.0

adventurous challenging mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

I have seen this book everywhere. My dad kindly bought me this for my birthday and I thought I would try and crack on with it. This book is slow-paced, and action packed.

The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction, but assassins are getting closer to her door. Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic. Across the dark sea, Tane has trained her whole life to be a dragonrider, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel. Meanwhile, the divide East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.

I usually struggle with fantasy books due to the world building and the characters and the terminology. But I didn’t struggle with this book. It was like slowly sinking into a marshmallow and I loved it. Usually, I can struggle with huge book if it a standalone, I love to read 600+ pages in the series but I can never usually do it with standalone, but this book worked for our big it was. If it was any bigger, I think I would have struggled. The book was split into 5 fives and throughout the book, you get 4 point of views which include from the North, South, East and West. I love the slow character building that you can see comes to a point. I also enjoyed the love story within this book, and I wanted more of that.

The only thing that stopped this being a five-star read for me was every big reveal and big twist was sort of anti-climax, I was just waiting for the reaction to be “Holy Sh*t” and it just didn’t happen, it was just sort of crept in and then we moved on. This was a really enjoyable read, but I was expected to be more of a big drop with the storyline.

Content Warnings