A review by pepperocinni95
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

2.0

I DNF’d this one at 300 pages. The plot and world building were too slow. There were so many characters that I didn’t know which ones were important enough to remember outside the main 5 and even the 5 did not feel fleshed out as well as they could have been. There were also several chapters/scenes that could have been expanded to better develop the plot/characters. There were several parts in the first 300 pages that were just skimmed over that definitely could have been fleshed out more (Kit and Loth starting their journey for the Donmata for one). The Eastern storyline gets dropped a lot to the point I forgot about those characters and what we last explored with them, and as someone who loves dragons their world is the most interesting but we see so little of it. The most interesting part of the story for me was when we met the dragon Fyredel and his initial confrontation with Queen Sabran and learn of Ead’s magic, but even that felt cut short. And I still know absolutely nothing about the Priory at this point! Overall I think this book has some good ideas and if they ever make it a TV Show/Movie I’ll definitely watch, but there was way too much going on for this to be one book. A duology or trilogy would have worked better here.