Reviews with content warning for Torture - Zakon Drzewa Pomarańczy. Część 1

The German version of The Priory of the Orange Tree is split into two parts, so I’ll review (and read) both parts separately. I’m not a fan of this decision because the two books just feel incomplete – this is because they technically are.

This first book introduces us to the world of the Roots of Chaos series and it’s quite hard to summarize the plot since the lore is so complicated. The story focusses mainly on two characters: There’s Tané who’s training to become a dragon rider. One day, she finds a stranger on the coast, threatening her life since outsiders are not allowed on the island she lives. I was not too invested in her story since I didn’t really like her. The other storyline follows Ead who’s a secret magician that lives at the court of queen Sabran to protect her. This second, more political storyline was definitely my favorite and I especially liked to see the court life around Ead and Sabran. Sadly,

Ead leaves the court at the end. I’m curious what will happen next to her though

The other storylines felt partly quite typical for those fantasy books that feel like they’re YA but are not really, like the many travelling sequences. I’m a bit tired of those more typical moments and in comparison to those, some scenes that would be interesting were not shown, like the all the tests Tané has to pass in order to become a dragon-rider.

The plot is also quite dramatic with moments like

Livelyn being killed by a murder squad after you think everything is going to be fine and Sabran having a miscarriage and being barren after it

. Because of this, barely anything positive happens in the story – this was one of the issues I had with the story. At least the writing style was nice, and I especially liked the way the dragons were described and the idea that they can mind-control humans. Furthermore, I loved the amazing lore and the world building around it.

When it comes to the characters, my opinion is a bit ambivalent. There are some characters I really enjoyed, like Niclays (I don’t know why lmao) or Ead. Her romance especially was such an amazing queer slow burn. At the beginning though, it was bit hard to differentiate between Ead and Tané since their characters were so similar. This may be the reason why there was no character that I was really rooting for in the first half of the book. I also had two other problems with the characters: First, some character constellations felt quite stereotypical for the genre. Second, character deaths are happening too frequent so that you barely have the possibility to bound with some characters;

for example, characters like Kit or Linera had great potential but because of their early death, we’ll never see in which direction their characters would have developed

But in summary, the first part of The Priory of the Orange Tree has some interesting characters and a great world building. While the plot may have some elements often seen in YA-esque fantasy, it is intriguing enough for me to continue with the series.

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