I'd heard nothing but good things about The Priory of the Orange Tree so I was interested in it (if a little intimidated). It ended up taking me about three weeks to read, in part due to its length. My main complaint is really that it took me probably ~200 pages to get invested. That is a lot of time to be working through dense worldbuilding and characters I don't really care about yet. A note that there IS an appendix of words and names at the back of the book, but I hadn't noticed this in the beginning and I also found it a bit frustrating to navigate in an ebook.

It's difficult for me to get into this without spoilers, but I struggled with understanding some of these characters, even as the book progressed. A lot of them seemed to have 1 or 2 personality traits without much more depth. The main relationship had so little chemistry and I didn't even understand why the characters liked each other or wanted to be together.

The writing was good, not great. There were a few minor inconsistencies and some awkward wording. What frustrated me most was the shortness of some of the chapters. I would feel like I was finally finding my rhythm with a character and then we would switch to another perspective. The story also relied on a lot of coincidences and by the end I could no longer suspend my disbelief of it all. I think this could have been edited down a lot -- or split into 2+ books. Over 800 pages and still I felt swaths of plot were just passed over in a few sentences.

Thankfully I did find this very readable in the end. I do think I probably could have DNFed this with no regrets if I hadn't been reading it with a book club, but despite my criticisms it wasn't a bad book, just definitely not a book for me.