8.5 out of 10

So I’m not entirely sure how I Amazon click stumbled onto Samantha Shannon’s, The Priory of the Orange Tree, but I’m very glad that I did.

It’s a one book, self contained epic fantasy with very strong queer and feminist overtones with fully fleshed out characters, including characters of color with their very own plotlines and no sidekick tropes.

Yet the fight against the status quo for queer love is not the centerpiece for this tale. No, it is far more epic than that, and Shannon gives us not just one but two distinct groups of dragons (yes, dragons) with multiple subtypes and a menagerie of draconic creatures to inhabit this world. When the cover image scene hit on my commute home, I was glued to my seat until it finished, which happened to be ten additional minutes in my driveway with the engine off, but it was really that riveting.

The worldbuilding itself is lush in Act 1, and the individual chapters of character viewpoints are divided across the East and West continents of the world. She does a great job of making storylines and characters collide unexpectedly, and oh what characters they are. I find myself with a soft spot for grumpy gay alchemist Niclays Roos, and loved it every time his POV or character showed up in a plotline. This seemed odd, since there is one queer female canon relationship and one other that is implied, but I found myself rooting the most for Niclays out of everyone.

I listened to the Audible version and Liyah Summers does a fantastic job with the character voices and making the world of the Priory come alive off the pages. That said, a friend of mine picked up the hardcover edition and it seems large enough to use as a self defense object or a weapon to annihilate small mammals. It is, however, 26 hours on Audible and I believe one of Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive books clocks in at 55 hours on Oathbringer, so size is relative when it comes to epic fantasy.

Now for the Cons:

Act 2 was slow, gruelingly slow, with no real foreshadowing. One of the characters has depression, which makes for a more realistic character, but is exhausting to read on the page and makes for a very inactive storyline. This act was also riddled with random worldbuilding stories and anecdotes that were only relevant so that a character could make an idiom. My biggest gripe was with the introduction of the ichneumon, which is a bear sized mongoose (yes, a gigantic mongoose) which characters can ride upon. This would have been AWESOME to figure out as a reader, if the Mother that slayed the first, most evil dragon called The Nameless One that we heard so much about (and really, there were multiple versions of this tale in Act 1) had been mentioned riding a gigantic mongoose across the desert, I would have been salivating in wait to point at an upcoming part of the story and say “OMG! There’s the giant mongoose!”

I never got the chance. When the ichneumon showed up, we got a description of a bear sized mongoose and then the story of how they fit into the world, which showed up as an info dump that broke the tension of that particular plotline. The rest of Act 2 was like that, with the reader unable to figure out any puzzles because they were given none of the pieces and then just handed the whole picture. Luckily Shannon ramped it back up and the Act 1 foreshadowing and Act 2 info dumping actually made for some pretty good reveals in Act 3 that really kept me engaged. 

Overall, for how much of an epic fantasy world she crammed into this book, I’m shocked Shannon managed to pull off as much plot and character arc fulfilments as she did. It’s a fantastic read, and it has its weak points, as any work does, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, literally.

Final Score: 8.5 out of 10, I just couldn’t get over the frustration of the Act 2 foreshadowing, but the rest of the book is as good as the genre gets for all of us that cheer for queer fantasy characters.