Finally finished this book and made myself write down all my thoughts before the words escape me. And I will start it by saying that I had a very complex journey with this one. It took me almost three months to finish it. But still I am glad I finished this and able to appreciate many things Samantha Shannon did with 'The Priory of the Orange Tree'.
My favourite part has to be the 'World Building'.! I loved how Samantha created such an intricate world and explored all the sides of it in detail, especially the conflict between East and West. We get to see our four POVs from the very far end of the world and parallelly we get to see their religion, their shared history with their ultimate enemy and how it shapes the world and beliefs as it is now. The way both sides converge in the second half through the past and present was amazing.
Characters - As I mentioned above, we have four perspectives from both sides of the world.
We have Ead Duryan, in the court of Inys (west), as a lady in waiting for the queen.
Tané, an ambitious student aiming to be a dragon rider (east).
Areloth Beck (Loth), a noble and close friend of Ead & Queen(west).
Niclays, an exiled alchemist in the East.
I liked all of them from the start with the exception of Tané. Due to some stupid move by her in the beginning, I had trouble warming up to her. But she grew on me as the book progressed. Another thing I really liked was all the character arcs. All the experiences and hardships these characters had was believable and developed them as an individual. I did not like Sabran at all and cannot tell you a more useless queen than her. But I liked all the other secondary characters and their role in the overall journey.
Most people really liked the romance, but I was not a super fan of it. It was refreshing to see F/F romance, but I was not completely sold into it.
The plot was kind of meandering and felt aimless many times. I would have appreciated it if I have not lost my interest so many times in between. It kind of dragged and that had me feeling - What is the point? But things started picking up a lot in the second half and I enjoyed it a lot more after that. There were so many angles and scenes I wanted to be explored but it did not happen. Instead, we spent an incredible length of the amount in court doing not much - that took most of the first half of the book! I would have also loved to see more about the dragon but that was a very secondary part of the overall book which I did not like.
I loved Samantha Shannon's writing. It was easy to follow and the detailed way she described the surroundings and how easily I was able to picturise the places and differences in the locations. But I would say that action scenes are not her strongest point. These scenes did not thrill me or made my heart jump with the anticipation or the consequences. That is why the 'Final Battle' kind of underwhelmed me!
Overall, I am glad I finished this as I really liked the last 40% of the book more than the rest. Would love to see more in this world about all the characters. Especially with that end scene with one of the character, that was so open-ended!
Overall Rating - 3.5 Stars!
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment