By: Brook Haight
The Priory of the Orange Tree is a book by Samantha Shannon. This book was marketed as being feminist with LGBTQ themes, so I was excited when I finally got around to reading it. However, after reading it, I can only give it three out of five stars. While there is strong worldbuilding and an interesting magic system, Shannon fails to deliver on both character and plot.
This is an epic fantasy story of a world divided by beliefs about dragons. The East deifies them, and the West despises them. Sabran of Inys is a ruler in the West, a member of a bloodline whose existence kept the scourge of the Wyrms at bay. Ead is a secret mage, sworn to protect Sabran, and she knows the truth of Sabran’s bloodline. And across the sea, in the East, Tane is a dragon rider who just lost her dragon, and will do anything to get her back. Despite the longstanding hatred between the two sides of the world, a growing threat might force them to reconcile their differences and fight together.
I’ll start with the positive: worldbuilding. This is a world that has a deep history and culture. It was interesting to see how culture and beliefs varied not just in the East and the West, but across the entire West, where different areas held similar but different beliefs. The history of the world was very meticulously planned out and hidden behind layers of intrigue. The magic system was also very interesting. Although it’s only explained in detail once, the idea that magic in the world balanced itself out was very cool.
I have a lot more to say with the bad. Firstly, the characters were almost all two-dimensional. The only exception to this was Niclays Roos, an alchemist who felt like the only one who ever suffered consequences for his actions. More on that later. The rest of the characters fell flat for me. Ead especially was the golden girl of this book. She could do no wrong. Although I loved her as a concept, I would’ve loved to see her struggle with more inner conflict. There were attempts at characterizing Tane, but I never felt like I could get inside her head. Her best friend is killed in the beginning of the book, and I believe it’s supposed to be emotional, but I just hadn’t spent enough time seeing the relationship between the friend and Tane to really care. The “growth” that she had was unsatisfying and felt forced. Sabran at least had character flaws, and struggled with some inner turmoil, but we never really spent time in her POV, so I never felt that connected to her either.
My other main issue was with the plot. The overall plot was interesting, and I enjoyed reading it to see what would happen. The problem for me was the timeline and deus ex machinas. The worldbuilding does a great job of making this world feel expansive and exciting, and the timeline of this book undoes that all. It felt like characters were traveling across this entire world in no time at all. I think if the timeline of this book had been that it took place over a few years instead of one, the pacing would be much better.
If the timeline issues were fixed, it would also help the amount of times that the author bails her characters out of bad situations. There were at least three times when a character is in dire straits and almost certainly going to die and also hundreds of miles away from where they need to be and a random magical animal comes and saves them and also takes them to where they need to be super fast. When Tane has her dragon, this makes sense, but every other time was frustrating. Beyond that, it felt as though the characters never really struggled through situations. This is especially egregious with Ead, who we probably spend the most time with. She was always correct, and any bad situations she faced were almost always resolved within a chapter or two. Despite there being a threat of an apocalyptic level event, I never felt the stakes at all.
I don’t necessarily feel as though this book was a waste of my time, but I wouldn’t reread it, or recommend it to anyone.
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