A year ago today I reviewed Priory of the Orange Tree! You can check out my original post here. I absolutely adored this book and ended up doing a standalone video review for it too!! Not something I do all that often! (you can watch that here)
So, do my thoughts hold up?
Well I have to admit, I’ve not re-read the book yet. At 800 pages it’s a bit big and I still have so many other big books on my tbr that I’ve not read yet! I think the glamour has worn off slightly, in that I’m separated from the story. So without my infatuation would I still rate this highly? Yes! I love the world that Samantha Shannon built. I still adore Ead and Sabran, and Tane is such an interesting character to read about along with all of the dragon lore.
This might be a tome but I still definitely recommend it to fantasy lovers!!
This was a shitshow of a year, let’s be honest. But I read some absolutely amazing books! In total I had 21 five star reads (out of a total of 78 books) which isn’t too shabby! I spent some time trying to pick my favourite of the year but I really just couldn’t. These four all stood out above the rest but I couldn’t pick between them all. So instead, you get all of them, along with why I loved them and a link to my full review of them if you wanna delve more into my thoughts. Also, these are in no particular order. Well they are, but it’s just date order from which one I read first in the year to last. But I honestly cannot pick between them. So let’s get into the list!
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon book cover
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
This book took me so long to get through, and given that it comes in at over 800 pages I don’t think anyone blames me. But oh. My. God. Did I LOVE this book!!! I have a blog review of it here, but I also ended up making a standalone video for this book (which you can watch here). That’s how much I loved it!
We follow multiple pov from different countries across this world as they discover more about dragons and about the other nations in their world. My favourite pov has to be Ead who is located in a royal court as a spy for a religious group as also as a protectorate of the Queen, but I loved reading from everyone’s perspective.
With dragons, Sapphic love, fighting and feminism (and Shannon’s gorgeous writing), well what more could you be looking for?!
The Deep by Rivers Solomon book cover
The Deep by Rivers Solomon
This book is one I kept seeing recommended through the end of 2019/beginning of 2020 and it sounded so utterly fascinating that eventually I just had to pick it up .
We follow Yetu, who holds all of the long term memories for her race of mermaids who live in Atlantic Ocean, descendants of enslaved Africans who had been tossed overboard on their passage to the United States. These traumatic memories would be too much for the populace to bare, so instead they allocate a historian to remember. This is Yetu. But these memories are traumatic for her too, and in trying to escape the pain they cause her, she flees to the surface.
This is an incredible book that I flew through and never wanted to put down. Check out my full review here.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi and translated by Geoffrey Trousselot
The second book in the renowned series, we all knew I would be picking this one up in 2020 after having loved the first book in 2019 (my review of book 1). And unsurprisingly I adored this book.
Trousselot does a beautiful job as this book is absolutely gorgeous in its prose and I’m so excited for them to translate book 3!
Nevernight by Jay Kristoff book cover
Nevernight by Jay Kristoff
The wonderful Kari from Kari-ng for Books sent me this as a gift and I am so so grateful, she’s gifted me the entire series and I’m so excited to get to the rest of the trilogy!
Following Mia as she enters the Red Church, an unusual school for an unusual student. Already skilled in various disciplines from her time with a tutor, she is now up against the best. Only some of them will survive, and she’s determined one of them will be her. She must avenge her family.
This is an incredibly dark book filled with so much intrigue and magic that you’re gripped the whole way through. Every page is saturated with knowledge and I adored the footnotes from our narrator! Full review here.
And these were my four favourites of 2020, I really couldn’t pick between them in the slightest but I adored them all. One thing I did notice was that they are all fantasy books, I’m really delving back into my fantasy roots at the moment after having a few years of reading more widely round the genres and to be honest? I’m loving it! I’m hoping there are some absolutely amazing 5* fantasy reads waiting for me in 2021!
Samantha Shannon’s latest book, The Priory of the Orange Tree, comes in at a whopping 804 pages and that’s not including the section at the end which gives you a timeline, a glossary and an explanation of characters. This is a BIG book. And it’s amazing. I gave it 5 stars and it is 100% a new favourite of mine!
Sadly this took me far longer than I wanted to get through it, for a variety of reasons that boiled down to being nervous about its size. If you’re the same I can tell you right now that if you sit and read 100 pages of this book each day, not only will you finish it in just over a week but you’ll be completely and utterly absorbed into the story.
Let’s start not with the story itself but with what Samantha Shannon included within her book. First things first, this is a f/f novel, this romance is written with such care and emotion that I was routing for it from the moment its possibility was conceived. In the interests of staying spoiler free I won’t mention who the ladies are, but I immediately routed for them as individuals and this really translated beautifully into routing for their romantic relationship. It flows naturally and you can tell that the two of them were always supposed to be together.
Keeping with the diverse theme, there is also a genuinely healthy mix of races in this book. Of course this is a fantasy world, but this is something that is sadly not as prevelant as it should be amongst fantasy. So many authors, often unconciously due to their own internal biases will include 90% (or more) white characters within their fantasy books. Not here! With the POV switching to people from various places around this world, as well as having multiple races living in one realm, we read from the POV of white, Black and Asian people with what I took to be complete equality (but I recommend taking this with a grain of salt as I am white myself and therefore live with inherent biases that I am still working to overcome).
Lastly in the amazing diversity that has been written in this book is the feminism. Now many books will have strong female characters, that thankfully is nothing new. But not only do we have strong women from every race (which is sadly still something of note) but these women have power. They are respected. In this fantasy realm, they are treated as equals. I thought I had read books like that before. No. I had multiple jolts as I read through this book where a leader of a Guard (or another similar position) turns out to be female and I had assumed they were male. One of the elder characters mentions his old tutor at one point. I didn’t realise I was automatically assuming they were male until he said “she”. This is all through the book and has really made me think about how women are portrayed in fiction. Even when they’re the “strong female character” they are often the exception, in many books men are still the teachers, the leaders, the ones with power. This book has really opened my eyes to what I was accepting from other books as equality, and how it really really wasn’t.
All of these regions and realms have beautiful world building around them, really fleshing them out and I was left feeling like I had an intimate knowledge of them all, whilst wanting to know more! When these different groups interacted with each other I really got to feel like I understood the political tension and the reason for each groups actions. Whilst I had my favourite narrators and locations I found myself never really agreeing with one side over another, their reasoning and way of life was explained so beautifully that I had complete empathy with all the variations.
By the time I was reaching the end of this book, I was wishing there were more pages! And I really did not expect that from an 800+ page tome that I had originally struggled to get through! I’ve found myself really sad that this is a standalone work and I do hope for at least some titbits from Samantha Shannon in the future about this beautiful world she has created. This is a new favourite book, one I recommend to anyone who enjoys fantasy. It will be sticking with me in my thoughts for a long time yet.
Abi of Pellinor 