The Priory of the Orange Tree, by Samantha Shannon

The size of this book is a daunting; a paperback of more than 800 pages is a brick to manoeuvre and just seems unnecessary. Could it not have been split into two? It is a sprawling tale of political machinations, magic and dragons in a world refreshingly lacking in racism and sexism, but riven with class division and religious intolerance. Shannon has clearly developed an extensive social, cultural and political history for her imagined world, which she uses to naturally inform the action. There are a myriad of characters in a multitude of places, which must have been quite a task to keep track of as an author – it’s a challenge for the reader. In the East aspiring dragonrider Tane jeopardises her future by helping a stranger. In the West, at the court of Queen Sabran, southerner Ead has a secret mission that puts her life at risk. The action switches rapidly between east and west for much of the tale, gradually revealing that both cultures face an existential threat that they must find a way to fight together. It takes long time to bring it all together. The writing has a lovely flow that verges on the poetic, but some of the invented words seem totally unnecessary and create an inconsistent tone. The central love story is unconvincing and superfluous to the plot. Sometimes you just don’t need a romance. Some of the characters could have been dispensed with sooner, to the benefit of the plot and cutting some of the many many, words. The book unfortunately becomes a slog, not for any flaw in execution but just because of its extreme length.