What happened Samantha?? The Priory of the Orange Tree was SO good, this pales so tragically in comparison. 

I made it 150 pages into this and couldn’t make myself go any further. I even checked reviews to see if my trepidations were just the result of a slow start and would improve as the book progressed, but no. 

I am not exaggerating when I say 50% of this book is just Shannon info-dumping lore, and the other  50% is wildly confusing descriptions of the characters actions mixed with mind-numbing descriptions of scenery. 

I’d say the info-dumping is at a pretty similar level to that of Priory, but it was enjoyable in that book because I didn’t know anything about the world, and the other elements of the book were really strong. However, having read Priory, everything in here feels WAY too similar to be discussing it in so much detail. This is definitely not helped by the fact that two of the three locations/communities we’re in are EXACTLY the same as Priory. There are so many other interesting kingdoms/queendoms/republics that could have been focussed on instead, why are we just getting a repeat of Priory?? This has also meant that a lot of the discussions and themes in here mirror those of Priory to an infuriating extent – I felt like I was almost reading a retelling of Priory, not a book set 500 YEARS before it. 

Then the other half of the problem is the descriptions. In Priory Shannon used really lush descriptive writing. One of my favourite things about that book is that there was so much description. Yet here, all of the descriptive writing is so basic, so stripped down. It feels clinical, and alongside the walls of history Shannon throws at us, it really just reads like a textbook. Adding to this is the fact that in this first 150 pages there has been absolutely nothing of substance in the conversations or emotions of any of the characters, it’s just – ‘we did this’, ‘we did that’, ‘oh no I have to get pregnant’. Where’s the DEPTH?? 

It also doesn’t help that the ‘plot’ has been moving ridiculously quickly. There will be one sentence that mentions something vaguely interesting, then the next we’ve jumped to a completely different topic/scene/action with no follow-up. And because I wasn’t getting enough substance about the characters, none of their decisions made sense to me, especially in the Priory chapters – the extent of their character motivation was ‘Siya is an untrustworthy child, bad Siyu’. And in turn this all meant I didn’t like any of the characters or want to root for them, and I certainly didn’t care about their motivations/story lines. 

This disconnect from the characters was also impacted by the fact that all three locations have literally the same storyline. Three young women about to come into power, all of which are reluctant to do so. And there’s SO much about pregnancy in all three of them. 

The final nail in the coffin was how unclearly Shannon wrote most of the action (by this I mean anything that wasn't info-dump or scenery description). It read like she was trying to be poetic, but all it led to was most of the description being too abstract to make any sense. She was obviously trying to infer things and ‘show not tell’, but I could hardly understand any of it. 

Overall, what an utter shame. I was entranced by The Priory of the Orange Tree. This, on the other hand, reads like a history textbook.