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

adventurous medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

 

I have been looking forward to reading this book for years and maybe if I've read it when it came out, I would have been more generous with my rating. Alas, by now, I've read a lot of fantasy and also a large amount of stories with queer pairings (let's call them on their name, fanfics)

The Priory sounds great in theory, right? It has everything (and more) that I like, including, but not limited to:
magic ✅
lgbtq+ characters (and romance) ✅
history/mythology of said magic ✅
political intrigue ✅
dragons ✅
pirates (privateers!) ✅
very cute animal companion ✅
flowers, trees, nature description ✅
badass female characters ✅
characters that love to read ✅
a map ✅
gender neutral name (companion) instead of husband or wife ✅
it's not your sexual orientation or the colour of your skin that has to be considered between companions, but rank ✅ (I mean... progress?)

It's just that even when the book filled in these slots on my checklist, it somehow missed a few arguably more important ones, such as: great worldbuilding, great characters and most of all, the excitement that I've got when reading fantasy. You know, the cluching the edges of my book and trying to read faster because oh gosh I can't believe that's happening, what is going ooooon?

I know that we have got an Author's note at the start about being "inspired by events and legends from various parts of the world", which is great, if somewhat simplistic. We have a massive, Arthurian/general European part of the world, an African one and a vaguely Asian one. Okay. Shannon is more comfortable with the first one, seeing that we know everything about that world, info dump style (I am not mad about that, actually, it's just making the overall story very unbalanced); we know some important information from the Priory and very few from the East. And we have Niclays, of course.

I have seen that some people are saying that this is such a massive book, it should have been shorter. I disagree. It's a long book in the terms of page numbers, yes, but it reads quite easily after you comfortably positioned yourself in Camelot Inys. Especially if you've read something like Game of Thrones where you get rare POV's that you have to reread multiple times, to remember 2 books from now, because it doesn't fit in the story yet, but know that it will become important later.
Here? If it's mentioned twice, you have a good chance it will become a Thing. Three times? I felt like we've been bludgeoned with Excalibur Ascalon.
I think it would have been better as a duology, to give Shannon and her editors time to work on the balance (hah!) of POVs and the characters a bit more. (The Enemy is bad for the reason of being evil and he is evil because in this universe there was an unbalance and he just happened to be born angry and wanted to destroy everything. Ooookay? Does that mean that the next time this unbalance happens, we will have a new Enemy? Will we have a neverending story?)

We are in an 800 pages standalone novel. There was a character who lamented multiple times, pages upon pages, about hedonism and alchoholism and the fact that even true love wasn't enough to curb this habit (and in fact it made it worse). Sure, sure, we are building characters, giving them depth, making him a human being with flaws and knowledge that we can relate to, cool. He is a POV character, but a minor one, just there to push the main characters into action. (He did have a character growth though, that was nice to see at least.) 
Might have been cool to give a stray POV to the big baddie, not just some vaguely threatening throwaway sentences when we meet him for a second.

On the other side of the world, the dragons are knowledgeable, loyal, they have their lore, their jewels, their riders, their habits. Not massively developed, but we know things about them, other than 'they are pure and good'. See what my issue is here?

The plot twists were not really twisting (I was only surprised at the first Queen's... previous relation to the King. Because my brain doesn't go there as a possible option).

A lot of times the characters got their Very Important Information from rumours, even when they were at court and they should gave gotten it from spies or informants. Or they were looking for something and *deus ex machina* they have found it just like that. No struggle or misdirection. 

Did you faint in a desert? If you are an Important Character, you will get saved. If not, you already died before the book began.
Don't worry, Dear Reader, because actions have no consequences, anyways. Things go missing all the time, but they will magically come around when you need them. You believed for a second that your life was in danger? Ah, as long as you are an Important Character, you will get plot armor and your HP will stop at 1, so you will be saved. The badass evil sorceress who is unstoppable and very powerful? She will give her very evil monologue. We will not get her in one hit, but maybe like three. That's believable, right? You don't know the ways of diplomacy? Your smile is just so gorgeous and this Emperor is so friendly to strangers that he trusts you and your Queen, because he is trying something new, otherwise how will we get an army in the last 120 pages? 

Here is my prediction based on the rules Shannon set up: if something grants immortality, I will take it as a world building truth. We know that the first fruits gave the Firstbloods long life and magic. Cleolind's body is in the Priory, Kalyba's got returned to her hawthorn tree and Neporo is nearby to hers. Kalyba was too easily defeated (so she will be back), the other two are I believe, in a sort of magical coma, because there were a lot of references like how Tané was tired after using it, but she recovered with time or "How she longed to sleep for eternity". I wonder how will they wake up? (Possibly Tané's blood will awaken the tree and her ancestor and Kalyba's flesh her tree, getting her back to life, in a weird never-ending cycle.)

There were characters that I enjoyed reading about, mainly Aralaq, Susa, Kit, Nairuj, Tané.

I enjoyed the book for what it is, in the end, a queer romance story with some fantasy elements. (I could go into how crazy fast their relationship developed as soon as we actually started the book vs. the time they spent together before, imbalance in power -yes, technically not your Queen, but she didn't know that when you started- etc., but I am not going to). I admit it, despite it faults, I did enjoy this romance. It's just a shame that the fantasy plot, the one that I was reading the whole book for, fell so flat, because damn it had a lot of potential to be great. I liked that we have had some discussions about womanhood and that we shouldn't just be for continuing the bloodlines.

I will be continuing the series, hopefully the next one will be better balanced.