The Priory of the Orange Tree

"No woman should ever be made to fear that she was not enough."

⭐⭐⭐⭐

5 weeks and 6 books later, yeah who knew I had that in me? Not me to be honest. It was a long time since I read this much in such a short amount of time, I have been loving it for sure but I would be lying if I didn't say that when I immerse myself so completely like this I am unable to do anything other than that thing, so films, tv, friends and social media really has been left on the shelf while I have been flipping pages with an unstoppable passion. I become singleminded in my obsessions and I just forget about things. So I'm taking a little bit of a break from reading, at least with this fervent passion I've had going on, my brain needs this. 

Okay, so to The Pirory.

I love this book. There is so much good in it. I was hesitant to start with it, because it is massive and high fantasy and that was intimidating to me. But I soldiered on during those early pages and once I started to get the hang of how everything was connected, and operated and the characters and their relations it started to just get easier and easier and it was a hard book to put down for sure. I fell in love, slow and first and then head over heels. What's not to love about sapphic romance, dragons and badass women?

The book is divided into 4 different points of views, Ead, Loth, Tane and Niclays. I took to Ead's pov immediately, I loved her because she is absolutely unapologetically a badass throughout the whole book, tender, stubborn and clever, I loved her above all else. Her chapters were about the Inysh court, the battles for power, the political intrigue and about falling in love above your station. It ticked all my boxes. I like Loth too, I do enjoy a throughly good guy from time to time, there are not many of those left in this world it feels like sometimes. But he joins the list of comedy males, Jake, Jonah, Ben etc, you know what kind of character Loth is then. He most of everyone in this story really is forced through some emotional ups and downs, particularly when it comes to his faith and I enjoyed that journey immensely. Niclays story is sad, I felt for him a lot and when that was slowly mapped out and applied to his actions a lot of what he chose to do in the beginning made a lot of sense to me. But his story grew less interesting towards the end, as Tane's who I have struggled the most with grew better. It's with Tane's arc this book misses the mark because it was so uneven and I often found myself looking ahead to see how many pages I had left of her chapters. It gets better towards the end, but it really doesn't happen way into like 600 pages, which is too long for me. 

But to some things that I loved then, the normalisation of queer relationships, badass women and female friendships, nuanced and complicated women, found family, the friendships that feel immensely rich and beautiful, the arcs, the world and a lot of scenes in between. My favourite the thing is probably the absolute lack of homophobia, it is so refreshing as well as the absence of rape and gratuitous violence towards women that has basically become representative of the fantasy genre in a voyeuristic way that makes my skin crawl. This made my heart sing instead. This has for sure set the standards extremely high for me going forward and I'm not sure how I am going to be able to read in this genre again without feeling disappointed or let down in some way? 

The 4 star I gave is due to the fact that I think it has a little bit of a pacing issue, some things feel a little too uneven to me, character interactions feel rushed, sometimes everything is too slow and then it is suddenly too quick the next chapter and I think maybe it should have been two books? It doesn't matter, and I have some more things that made me a little bit annoyed, but those are spoilery things that I am keeping away from here so I won't say what they are. And at the end of the day this world is so intricate and complicated, and I love the religious conflict being at the forefront of their problems and trust issues, it feels unusual to me. I can't wait for Sammantha to write more, I can't wait to come back to this story and hopefully get a proper ending for some of them.