A review by sofipitch
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

adventurous slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

This was fine. I'm not sure I would have finished it if it wasn't an audiobook which I could listen to while driving to work or at work. I did consider DNFing and what saved it was the first dragon appearance. This book has a TON of lore, at least the first 5 hours just feels like being hit with a firehose, and at the same times lots of parts of the world still felt undeveloped. I think the world Shannon created was maybe too large and as a result, a lot of the countries and cultures of color were the ones that suffered, as opposed to Innys, the England stand in. I actually thought I was stupid and had just missed a lot at the beginning, bc the beginning has 3/4 of the POVs all being different ppl from different cultures entering a new one and commenting on it, but no there just wasn't much. This got a lot of praise for having lots of characters of color but I only thought it was okay in effort there.
There are also a lot of potentially interesting scenes that aren't shown on screen, such as the water trials, competitions to determine if you are skilled enough to be a dragon rider. You get scenes of Tané stressing about them but not the scenes itself. Shannon likes writing exposition a lot, very obviously not action, which for an 800+ page epic is not great. A lot of information is given to you only as it is relevant, and directly from the characters in dialogue. There is no sense of the readers figuring anything out. The villains are 1-D just plain evil and pretty boring. I did end up caring for the characters but that did take a while for me to get into. Overall, entertaining, it was a throw back to the kind of huge fantasy novels I remember reading as a kid, but nothing special
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