The Priory of the Orange Tree

By: Samantha Shannon

Narrated by: Liyah Summers

A world divided.
A queendom without an heir.
An ancient enemy awakens.

The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction - but assassins are getting closer to her door.

Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic.

Across the dark sea, Tané has trained to be a dragonrider since she was a child but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel. Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.

©2017 Bloomsbury (P)2019 Audible, Ltd

Rich world evincing present-day issues

Samantha Shannon masterfully constructs a fantasy world underscoring many of the same issues important today -- feminism, religion and the dangers of fanaticism, distrust of outsiders, etc. Notably, the story takes place in a sophisticated, complex political climate, where there are not simple answers to everyone working together in harmony, ringing true to the globe today. Personal identity themes are also embedded throughout -- homosexuality, religion/skepticism, and the value of friendship to name a few. It's intriguing how much of society is matriarchal, allowing Shannon to explore a world where misogyny has not abounded for centuries. The story itself is very well interwoven between many characters and lands, and I found myself completely engrossed. You might feel a little confused and overwhelmed at the beginning because there are a lot of names and places to digest, but as you keep reading it all builds, connects, and becomes interwoven.

While I agree the narrator is not my favorite ever, I don't agree she's the worst ever. Some characters do sound similar, but not all. It took me a little time to get used to her delivery, but some subtleties grew on me as I listened more. I think she does a reasonable job getting across certain personality traits and drawing my attention to them, such as Ead's growing willingness to stand up to authority and Roos' disgruntled state in his perceived failures.

I listen to a lot of fantasy, and would recommend this one as worth your time.

A Contemporary Epic Fantasy with a Generic Nemesis

Tane is an apprentice dragon-rider from Seiiki in the East. For her, dragons are divine, wise, beautiful beings of air and water. Ead is a mage-agent of the Priory of the Orange Tree sent to secretly bodyguard Sabran Queen of Inys in the West while serving as one of her maids in waiting. In the West, dragons are demonic, malevolent beings of fire and earth. To Tane, Ead’s people are wicked wyrm-killers, while to Ead Tane’s people are wicked wyrm-lovers. If Tane and Ead’s cultures and religions were seeing the same creatures according to different prejudices, Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree (2019) might be more interesting than it already is, but in fact they are seeing different species who only share great size, strength, and age. The dragons of the East are benign beings who fly via organs in their heads called “crowns” and breathe air, while the dragons of the West are evil monsters who fly via wings and breathe fire. And while the eastern dragons are foes of the Nameless One, the western dragons are the Nameless One’s minions.

The Nameless One is a Satanic figure who was bound down in the Abyss a thousand years ago and whose apocalyptic liberation is rumored to be at hand. Can the different peoples unite to save their world from the apparently inevitable return of the Nameless One and his draconic army? Involved with the millennia-long conflict are two celestial jewels made from and for two kinds of magic (earth and star), a powerful sword composed of both magics, three magical trees (hawthorn, mulberry, and orange), and multiple religions.

With its rival religions, Elizabethan, Africanesque, and Asiatic cultures, sublime dragons, talking birds and ichneumons and vivid descriptions (e.g., “Her voice was war conch and whale song and the distant rumble of a storm, all smoothed into words like glass shaped by the sea”), Shannon’s world is well-imagined.

The chapters of the novel rotate among four point of view characters (two female, two male) in different regions/cultures of the fantasy world (west, east, south). Shannon features more than one sympathetic gay character, as well as a post-racial world in which no one looks down on anyone else for having a different skin color, of which there are plenty. In addition to dragon-riding warriors like Tane and dragon-killing mages like Ead, there are many other strong female characters: the Gloriana-like Queen Sabran of Inys, the Golden Empress leader of 40,000 pirates, a princess trying to rule behind her demonic dragon-possessed father, a thousand-year-old witch of the wood, a younger sister who’s tougher and smarter than her big brother, and more. The male characters are less interesting, but there is a fine one, the exiled gay alchemist Niclays Roos, still mourning his high-born lover, still seeking the elixir of immortality, and still nursing a grudge.

The reader, Liyah Summers, does a good job of enhancing the text. Although she tends to get in a similar rhythm during the narration, she uses a variety of English accents (e.g., RP British, northern British, Caribbean English, and even, I think, American South) for characters from different cultures, doesn’t try too hard to make male voices sound male, and does pretty cool ichneumon and dragons and ancient witches.

The most disappointing part of the novel is the generic, one-dimensional satanic dark lord nemesis, the unimaginatively named Nameless One. There is no explanation or exploration of his motivation to turn the world into a burnt wasteland or of that of his “draconic army” (dragons, wyverns, cockatrices, basilisks et al). Milton’s Satan makes the Nameless One look empty and boring. And when you think of Cob in Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore or the Crippled God in Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, or even of Voldemort or Sauron, Shannon’s Nameless One is disappointing. I would prefer something interesting happening whereby, for instance, it turns out that there is no Nameless One, that he is a product of religious fanaticism driving war among the human cultures, instead of a real bogeyman driving the humans to cooperate.

Other disappointing features of the book are the not infrequent times when Shannon employs glaring authorial plot contrivances or sleights of hand to put her characters through extra hard challenges or to get them from point A to point B on her map. She makes Tane and her dragon way too conveniently strong or weak depending on plot requirements.

Although it is a relief to find a one-volume stand-alone epic fantasy book these days, I often got the feeling that the novel should either have been longer or shorter. Some of the other rulers apart from Sabran maybe didn’t need to be introduced or should have been introduced earlier with more to do on stage. The Golden Empress (queen of the pirates) feels like an untied loose end.

It does require an investment of time and mind to get into ANOTHER secondary epic fantasy world with its own history and cultures and so on, but once several chapters in, the compelling characters and their various situations take over, and it becomes a page turning experience with some surprisingly moving moments. The climax was neat in being compact and exciting. But I did find that several weeks after finishing it was a rather forgettable book.

Wow

I didn’t really know what to expect when I started this book, but I was blown away. The complex and thorough storyline, the performance, voices, and accents—all of it was incredible. If you love fantasy, particularly fantasy worlds and stories that are built, developed, and resolved within a single novel (rather than a series), this is the book for you. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Great all around!

Strong female characters, LGBT+ representation, a complex fantasy world, and dragons, what more can you ask for in a series? The narration was wonderfully done with unique and distinguishable voices for characters.

High Fantasy at its Peak

Not one wasted word in 800 pages. A grand adventure that's breadth expands across many countries and traverses political waters as well as literal waters. Romance, magic, dragon riding and slaying, knights, and pirates, this book has it all without once feeling over-crowded with ideas. 

The narration captured well the varying accents of a diverse world and the emotional pulse of each scene.

Boring characters, so-so narration

Did not finish at 30%.

I didn't much care for the narrator - her female foreign accents were very good, but her male characters sounded either strange (or female), and it was hard to distinguish when the characters were speaking from her general narrating voice, which made the story hard to follow.

I also didn't care for either of the two main characters and didn't see much character development or personality from them.

However, the world building and writing were both lovely.

Amazing Standalone

I didn’t know what to expect when I picked up this book. I knew that per the author it was supposed to be a standalone but there were a lot of people that were complaining that there was no way it was. After reading this book I can 100% say it is a standalone. This story came to an end. That is not saying that she can not write another story that is down the road in this world when the characters come together again. This is a case of just because you want more does not mean that there will be more.

I enjoyed this book more than I really thought I would. The story flowed and did not drag on. There were just enough POVs to keep you engaged without being bored.

The love story was wonderful and was built into the story and I did not see it as the main focus. Which for me was a nice change.

I would recommend this book to anyone looking for an easy fantasy to read. Yes, it is large but it was a fun read.

Top notch!

Loved this book! It was... Satisfying! I will definitely be looking for more from this author in the future.

Just don’t listen to the audiobook

I loved the first half of this book so I downloaded the Audio version to listen to in the car. The narrator is so terrible for this book that I almost didn’t finish reading the book because she put me off so much. Her accents and pace are some of the worst I’ve ever heard to point where some specific voices hurt my head to hear.
Critically the book itself is pretty good! The ending is somewhat sloppy feeling and a little anti climatic but overall I enjoyed reading it!

Spectacular

I really enjoyed the other series with the Pale Dreamer and got this book because of those but the single book was even better.