At this point in the book, Shannon was still spinning the story of Virtudom while the narrators encountered mini battles to collect all the artifacts that they needed to defeat the wyrms. I was already around 700 pages in and the war with The Nameless One still hasn’t started. I found it quite exciting reading about how the narrators felt as everything they believed in and had faith in shatters as more and more secrets are exposed, especially when one of the Firstblood, Kalyba, tells the story for what it is since she lived through it all. It starts to pick up when the history of their world starts to unravel though. It was honestly a drag trying to read the first hundred or so pages (also the reason why I took so long to finish the book). There are a lot of internal dialogue for each of the narrators.

The Priory of the Orange Tree starts slow.

They learn the real story behind the Saint and the Damsel as well as their ties to the Firstblood (women who are blessed by fruits of different trees, one being the Orange Tree) and the source of the dragons and wyrms’ powers. They each have a path to follow (except Ead and Loth who are already friends as the story starts) but their fates bring them together. The whole story follows these four characters as they navigate through a world where the threat of The Nameless One is looming. Ead and her priory sisters believe that the Saint is a deceiver and that the members of the priory are descendants of the Mother (Virtudom’s Damsel and wife of the Saint) and her handmaidens formed a thousand years before the events of the book. Loth and Roos fall under the first, Tane, the second and Ead is part of the secret group called Priory of the Orange Tree. Their world was divided basically into three: those who are part of Virtudom (they believed in the Saint and are against all dragons), those who do believe in dragons, and those who are under the influence of The Nameless One and its wyrms. They belong to different parts of the world. I don’t really want to give out spoilers but the story is basically told in the POV of four characters: Ead, Loth, Tane and Roos. I was lucky enough to get this for free from Amazon Kindle last year. Samantha Shannon’s fantasy book, The Priory of the Orange Tree, is 835 pages long! Kind of reminiscent of GRRM’s books (and ugh, I need to get back to reading The Once and Future King).

The priory of the orange tree books