Uptown Oracle Reads… The Priory of the Orange Tree | High Fantasy Dragons, Magic Trees and Beautifully Complex Characters

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

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A world divided. A queendom without an heir. An ancient enemy awakens.

The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction – but assassins are getting closer to her door.

Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic.

Across the dark sea, Tané has trained to be a dragonrider since she was a child, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel.

Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.

The Priory of the Orange Tree is a high fantasy which is very focused around the central characters and how they’re going to protect themselves against the Nameless One. Shannon takes time to build out her characters so well that we understand the actions they take and why they take them.

Ead is, in my eyes ,the main character and POV.  I’m unsure if that’s on purpose but she felt very in depth, had a complex history and current adventure, and had relationships with multiple other characters in both her POVs and other characters POVs too. We see her conflicted as she’s succeeded so well as the bodyguard for Sabran, and formed attachments in the court but she gets called back to the Priory to become a Red Damsel, the role she’s been dreaming of. This conflict is reminiscent of real life where family and your job often get in the way of one another, but Ead finds a way. 

Niclays is an alchemist who’s been exiled by Sabran and lives in Seiiki instead. He’s a slightly bitter old man, and still mourns for the man he loves and the family he’s left behind. Niclays is our way to understand more of the past of Inys since our other characters are younger, he’s also highly intelligent and in his search for immortality his knowledge becomes important to the whole story. His POV was the one I struggled with the most as it takes time to figure out why he’s important to the plot. 

Tané is a dragon rider but a nice kind of dragon (not the fire breathing wyrms!). She becomes a dragon rider within the story, but slowly unravels until she turns up in the right place to become entwined with the overall story. This worked better than Niclyas inclusion to the story, but particularly at the start of the book it was hard to see why she was important to the story Shannon was trying to tell. Similar to Ead, she does have an interesting backstory and history to the plot, and is a strong female character, but she also suffers a lot more loss of faith throughout.  

Loth is last but not least for our POV characters and again has a direct link to Sabran. He’s a lord of Inys and childhood friend of the Queen as well as friend to Ead during her time at court. After Sabran’s court believes he’s too close he’s sent on a mission that he probably won’t return from. His adventure leads him to uncover some secrets that are vital for Sabran and Ead to know, and his POV chapters give us a lot of world building for Inys and surrounding areas in the West. 

The POV characters are split 50/50 for their genders, and I feel like Samantha Shannon has worked hard to create a story which shows strength in women as well as men. This isn’t to say women don’t receive similar treatment to the real world, with characters such as Sabran worrying she’s only fit to birth a child for example, but that the women are given agency and means to act without it being based on men or a man’s actions. 

The one thing that stands out as a negative is that the book does feel harder to get into at the start. It’s a slow build of the characters, the world, religions and the courts we visit – but the start of the book doesn’t make it clear what the overall story arc will be for all 4 characters. Once you do figure this out, you do become more invested in the characters and wanting to find out what happened. But, it does take some time and it’s a huge daunting book so may not be for everyone. 

The Priory of the Orange Tree is seeped with rich history and lore which we find out early on in the book, but it comes up later as important to the story too. I loved the history of the Orange Tree and Cleolind, as well as the clear differences in story depending on who is telling it. The victor always dictates the tale that is told, and this is clear in Inys as the Virtudom faith is based on a story that opposes the story in every other place in this world.  

On top of Dragons and religion, there’s a magic system in place which was intriguing to discover. Magic or Siden in this world comes from trees including the titular Orange Tree there’s also a mulberry and hawthorn tree too. This world is in a balance, so the dragons have magic too which is a direct opposition of the tree’s magic. 

The Priory of the Orange tree uses traditional features of dragons, as well as pulling from different cultures views on them too. I love that we also see some different creatures like the Ichneumon who work with the Priory as well as cockatrices, amphiptere, and ophitaurs being mentioned as part of the Nameless One’s draconic beings. Mostly I felt that whilst the world building may have slowed down the book in parts, I loved all the extra details and information which made the world feel bigger.

Positives of The Priory of the Orange Tree

• Character complexity and relationship building
• World building, religion, court politics and creatures

Negatives of The Priory of the Orange Tree

• Slow start and build up to the actual plot
• Some parts didn’t add to the overall story

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