The Priory of the Orange Tree

This book was...not good. And I'm gonna rant about it.

The sense of scale that the author is trying to build doesn't hold up to the slightest critical thought.
What should be huge cultural, political, and intellectual shifts in the world get glossed over, explained away with one or two sentences. (holy shit did I really wanna be in the room when Sabran spends - what was it - 2 weeks right? - convincing the council to break their MILLENNIA LONG embargo with another nation!!! Why didn't we get to see any of that??? Why do people say this is a political fantasy book but we rarely get to see any of the actual politics being made?) Shannon ignores valuable opportunities to meaningfully build the world and the culture - they get hand-waved in favor of spending time describing architecture and clothing with constant use of archaic 18th century language from England (it's worth noting here that only the “Western Europe” analog in this world gets this treatment. If the author had used archaic Chinese or Japanese words for her “Asia” stand-in, or, like, Arabic words for her “Africa” stand-in I wouldn't be nearly as critical, but of course she didn't :) The Euro-centricity is....uh, glaring)

Other people have gotten into this next point much more coherently than I will so I'll just say: It's very obvious that Shannon has strong opinions about motherhood, and they are probably universally bad takes. This book is feminist in that very specific “choice feminism” way that ignores history and context and intersectionality.

If you strip away names and places, 3 of the POV characters' inner monologues are indistinguishable (the only exception is Niclays, who is the only stand out character imho, and the only POV I regularly looked forward to getting back to. Love a coward POV <3)

There are multiple points where a literally earth-shattering truth is dropped on a character. One that destroys the very basis of their religion or political power. And a majority of the time they just kind of....shrug? Accept very quickly and move on b/c the plot has to keep moving, no time to wait up for a character to have an existential crisis or be in denial or grieve. When this /is/ addressed, it's all very “tell not show”. We'll get a line that says “[character x] is grappling with this new idea” or “[character y] is grieving for their friend” and then like, nothing else. Sabran specifically gets snapped out of what we're told is a multi week depressive episode by being talked to sternly for 3 minutes. Cue eye roll.

The magic also has no internal logic. This isn't always a bad thing, but there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to who has power and why. Dragons are powerful gods of the sea....except when they're kidnapped by pirates and then they're no more intimidating than a large caged predator. Magic done by humans seems to have very few limits with very few consequences, even for beginners.

This book managed to be dense without being even a little complex. Such a shame.