I really enjoyed this book. Unfortunately, I cannot say that I loved it, because I only felt the need to read it when I was en route, which is quite funny if you know the length of this book. Because of this The Priory of the Orange Tree accompanied me on my route to Uni and back home for weeks. At the beginning, I wanted to write an elaborate review on what I genuinely thought this book did perfectly and where its potential flaws lay. After I finished this book, I felt nothing. No positive nor negative feelings. I couldn’t capture my thoughts then, and I still can’t. I don’t know why, and it really confuses me, because I’m not sure how to work with that feeling, if I’m being honest. On the back of my edition is a quote from the Sunday Times that reads: „The next generation of hit fantasy fiction…[A] feminist Lord of the Rings“. I found myself returning to this excerpt a lot. In terms of the worldbuilding, this book absolutely delivers. If you take the time to write something this long, you shouldn’t spare on details. Luckily that wasn’t the case here. I really enjoyed reading pages full of details that never felt like unnecessary fillers between plot points. On the contrary, they actually helped me get more immersed in the world and better understand the characters and their stories. The protagonists are, of course, a significant contrast to LOTR’s characters, but LOTR was feminist in its own way too, if you only consider that the female characters who were given more than two sentences actually played a meaningful role in shaping the story’s outcome. One aspect that stood out to me, small as it was, was the mentioning of the changing seasons, to winter for example. These are the kind of details that you only register when you stumble upon them, but in my eyes it really elucidated the length of the journeys. It underlines that a huge story like this needs its time, because things take time to develop and the fact that some characters held onto their opinions for so long before changing their minds made everything feel a lot more relatable and realistic. There is something that I want to criticise, but there is nothing in my mind, even though I know there is something. I just can’t grasp it. Maybe it was that some decisions felt a little rushed or abrupt, even after the arc of suspense worked long towards this moment. Or maybe it was my feeling that the arc of suspense was held a little too long and steady in some parts so when the end finally came, it didn’t quite surprise me the way it should’ve. I also would’ve appreciated if the section „The Person of the Tale“ had been placed at the beginning of the book, since I had no idea it existed until I reached the end. Perhaps the decision was made deliberately, to avoid spoilering yourself on the characters before you meet them. That said, I never once found myself in a situation where I lost track of who was who, which speaks for the book.