(no subject)

[skygiants]

Right, so, the thing is, if I had known that Samantha Shannon's Priory of the Orange Tree, which I have seen variously recced, was eight hundred pages long, I probably would have acquired the ebook. But in fact I did not know and therefore spent a week stubbornly hauling the the eight hundred page library hardback with me all around the city of Boston, and that ... may have impacted my feelings about the book ....

I mean, it's a perfectly reasonable Epic Fantasy, with worldbuilding that draws specifically on Spenser and the chivalric ideal in some unusual ways; also, I was reliably informed that there were lesbians and indeed there turn out to be so. I just found myself wishing quite often at times that it was a few hundred pages shorter.

The plot: on one side of the world, in Chivalric Fantasy Europe, undercover battle nun Ead Duryan is posing as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth I Sabine, part of a hereditary line of monarchy that according to the religion of Chivalric Fantasy Europe) holds off the rise of the evil dragons of absolute evil just by existing. The rest of the world largely thinks this is bullshit, but since they also, would nonetheless prefer the evil dragons not rise, Ead's nunnery has sent her to keep the queen alive in the spirit of "eh, can't hurt."

On the other side of the world, in Fantasy Japan Has Dragons (But Not The Evil Kind) (But Try Telling That To Chivalric Fantasy Europe), dragonrider hopeful Tané buries a secret in order not to miss her chance to take part in dragonrider trials, that unsurprisingly ends up biting her in the ass as well as the local exiled Fantasy Dutch alchemist who's gotten accidentally caught up in it.

Meanwhile, the evil dragons are indeed rising, so sooner or later everyone's going to have to work together to find the right combination of MacGuffins to get them to stop -- and sooner or later everybody does, but it takes about four hundred pages of maneuvering people into position before anyone starts to do much that is useful. So that's part of it; and part of it, also, is that, while I appreciate complicating national myth and memory, and I get the temptation to have Fantasy Europe be very emphatically wrong, I wish it had turned out to be a little more complicated than Their Religion Is Based On A Lie Whereas Ours Is Based On A Feminist Truth...

But mostly, I think, this is just a perfectly reasonable example of a kind of book that just doesn't do as much for me anymore as it would have ten or fifteen years ago. There's nothing inherently wrong with a plot about bringing the world together to defeat the evil dragons of absolute evil, but it takes a lot of really good character work to make that plot feel interesting to me, personally, and character work is just not the thing that Samantha Shannon seems interested in.

(... I say, sheepishly looking at my holds on the Mallorean books at the library; but a.) nostalgia, b.) intentionally or unintentionally the David Eddings books are definitely funny, whereas only two people in the entire cast of Priory of the Orange Tree ever give any evidence of possessing a sense of humor, in the whole enormous cast of the book, and one of them dies two hundred pages in, and neither of them is the author.)

Comments

[shadaras]

I think your comment about Shannon not being interested in character work crystallizes for me why I (a) stopped reading Priory a couple hundred pages in and then (b) didn't put any effort into picking it up again. And, like, I enjoy epic fantasy! Dragons and cool women should've gotten me into this book, and yet... it just didn't captivate me.

I wonder if it would've worked better if we'd only gotten one of the threads? Like, I really enjoyed Ead's storyline, and Tane's storyline had promise, and what's-his-name, the knight, was maaaaaybe starting to do something interesting when I fell off, but... each storyline took far too long to get set up, and so it just didn't work, because I'd forget details about each storyline while off in the others. (Despite being a long-time fantasy reader who's actually quite good at remembering obscure details most of the time.)

So, yeah, your perspective sounds about right to me, even though I didn't finish the novel.

[aamcnamara]

WAIT YOU'RE ON DREAMWIDTH AND KNOW skygiants I mean that's good, you should know each other, but what

[shadaras]

I found skygiants due to someone else's post (not even about books! about a podcast I listen to!) literally within the last week and then was all 'ooh you like a lot of books that I like, I want to follow you'.

but yeah also I have a dreamwidth, follow for me actually talking about my life on the internet :)

[skygiants]

omg did you find me through one of kate_nepveu's Friends at the Table posts, HI, PLEASE TALK TO ME ABOUT FRIENDS AT THE TABLE (and also about books)

[shadaras]

YES I DID :D (the one full of fanwork recs that kate_nepveu posted a link to on the FatT discord)

I am DELIGHTED about FatT and what they're doing and how much drama the end of Spring is currently filled with, along with all the ??? teasing about what Season 6 will end up being (and the Road to Season 6 games! are really cool!), and it is the one podcast I've tried that I've loved like this. The fandom is also just really great and fun and seems to be full of good people, which makes me very very happy. :)

[skygiants]

I literally just yesterday caught all the way up to the present on FatT, after spending three years slowly listening through the backlog, and was like "Maybe it's time to listen to a different podcast! ... no, actually, it's time to actually check out the FatT Patreon-only stuff that I've been ignoring for the past few years while trying to get through the entire main story backlog, YESSS ANOTHER HUNDRED EPISODES, HERE WE GO." That will probably take me another year to get through and I'm perfectly happy about it.

I don't understand how to use Discord but the FatT Discord ... sounds tempting ......

[shadaras]

Aha, yeah, that sounds about right. A friend got me into it sometime during Winter; I don't remember exactly when, just that I somehow binged all of it in time to be pretty much caught up for TM and the start of the Patreon, and have then been keeping up to date with everything 'cause it's just that good.

The Patreon stuff is so much fun! Bluff City is amazing, and the Live stuff is generally hilarious, and Road to Season 6 is so fascinating to watch and wonder what the actual season will end up being.

The Discord is really nice overall? Like, I don't talk on it much, because giant IM spaces are not my favorite (small ones can be fun, but there are too many people there, even if only a small percentage of them are talkative), but there's a pretty consistently chill and positive vibe there, and everyone gets excited, and I get to read everyone's new-episode reactions (kindly placed in their own channel and also spoiler-texted) in real-time.

[skygiants]

That's such impressive speed! I think they were still finishing up Counter/Weight when I started listening, lol, and I've been veeeeery slooooooooowly gaining ground ever since, pursuing over many years and many miles -- but it's sped up quite a bit over the past year, since I added a lot more walking through quiet areas where podcast listening is a reasonable thing to do to my weekly routine. I'm really looking forward to listening to Bluff City, the teaser episode they dropped in the main feed was extremely good! (And also I grew up going to Atlantic City every summer, so I expect nostalgia will be a key element too. I hope they reference Lucy the giant elephant hotel.)

That does sound pleasant! It would be nice to read episode reactions in real time rather than carefully avoiding them and then trying to dig them up on Tumblr months later ...

[shadaras]

I had a lot of free time when I started listening, and decided to use it binging everything. In chronological order. Because I was like that. Sometime around Nacre, as you do, I fell in love with the kind of storytelling they were doing. Sometime during Counter/Weight, I realised there were specific people whose characters I would just always love (Jack and Art). That helped with just going through the whole thing very fast, though the downside is that I remember the story overall but not always the specific beats. So, uh. I've ended up relistening to it (chronologically once more) slowly, so that I can actually remember what happened when? And after a year and a half-ish of that being my while-driving-listening, I have gotten to... the part of C/W where they switch into The Sprawl.

I've never been to Atlantic City, but even for me there's a lot of fun references going around about weird Americana in general. :) I am fairly certain they do reference the elephant hotel somehow, but I couldn't tell you when or how or if there is one in Bluff City. Nostalgia is definitely a big part of it, though, since Austin grew up near to Atlantic City anyway, and at one point spent like an hour of his Drawing Maps stream just giving everyone a virtual tour of it complete with references about his life. (The rest of that stream is extremely full of spoilers for Bluff City, but that bit alone was very cool.)

Yeah! The fandom's pretty good at making sure that it's hard to read spoilers without putting effort into it, at least, even if it also makes it hard to look up reactions if you're catching up. The discord's also nice 'cause the parts of it that are just about 'hey, go ahead and have spaces to talk about whatever else you like too' are just as active as the part about the show, which helps it feel like an actual community instead of just a place to be an obsessive fan.

[skygiants]

Nacre was definitely the point in season one where I fell hard for the show too -- not just how incredible Nacre was itself but the notion that this whole incredible thing happened because of an offhand joke about undead pirates just made me go "oh this way to make a story happen is FASCINATING." And then eventually I hit the point where I too would listen to Jack, Art and Ali do just about anything...and then I convinced my girlfriend to start listening so I also would have an excuse to relisten to episodes with her occasionally, and now we're at the Counter/Weight holiday special. >.>

YESSS ELEPHANT HOTEL! I'm so excited to pick out references as I listen. I was about to say, "I expect it will make me want to go back for a visit," but then I thought about FATT's general scene-setting and storytelling methodologies and, uh, I'm pretty sure I'd never want to visit anywhere in Hieron....

[shadaras]

Yes! I've always loved roleplaying, and have done a lot of it, and the improv turns like that are always the best, but I have rarely seen it taken that far. I'm so glad they play systems that let them change stuff up on the fly, so that they can pull stuff like that off.

:) Bluff City probably will make you want to go back for a visit! Exactly what emotion you feel about that will depend on when in their first season-arc you are, I think.

I'd love to visit specific places in Hieron during specific times, but only for brief periods. Like. I think there are times Marielda would be interesting and fairly safe. Or Nacre, before the war. But then, that's basically... off-screen times are safer because there isn't any active pain.

[skygiants]

It's honestly made me really want to play some of the powered-by-the-apocalypse systems, even though I know that I am nowhere near as good at improv as they are and would not be able to take it in directions anywhere near as creative, easy as they make it sound ... I just started playing a few years back when I moved to Boston, and my group is GREAT but we've mostly done D20 systems that are a bit more rule-bound. I love the character stuff they do with bonds and alignments, too.

I guess I also have to admit that I would love to visit Nacre at any time Nacre is in existence, with the caveat that I would also like to be able to go home again afterwards, which isn't usually in the cards for a Nacre vacation. However, I think it would be very unwise for me to visit Marielda because the constant reconfiguration would get me wildly lost and I would eventually starve to a confused death in an alley.

[shadaras]

They've had a lot of practice! But even without that much practice, it's a lot of fun. :) I grew up on d20 systems (D&D 3.5), and in college started moving towards other systems (White Wolf, etc), and my friend who got me into FatT got our gaming group to try some PbtA games. It's a really nice change of pace, and for groups like mine that like storytelling more than "How big a number can I get?", it's satisfying to play in a system that biases towards "make things interesting". Bonds and alignments are great and I just want to stick bonds and beliefs into literally any game I run now, because they help define characters so much.

[aamcnamara]

Hah the internet is tiny! Especially the Dreamwidth internet. I mostly talk about writing stuff here but also sometimes life. I am pleased to have located you on DW and that two of my friends now know each other! (skygiants book posts are THE BEST.)

[shadaras]

It really is! Also, I'm amused that you're now like... the only person who has found all the social media I exist on? Because DW is the one I never actively told anyone about. :)

[aamcnamara]

I mean I don't yell a lot about my dreamwidth myself, it makes me feel like a social media hipster, like, Oh yes, I still listen to vinyl and write longform friendslocked blog posts on the internet. >.>

[skygiants]

I have at this point accepted without embarrassment that this is my house and I'm just gonna live here until it gets bulldozed down. I'm old! Don't make me move!

[aquamirage]

you put up your tiny fence and the neighborhood association has approved it!

[skygiants]

🎵 IT'S A BIG LITTLE TOWN 🎵

[shadaras]

It's funny thinking of it as a hipster space when it's probably the kind of social media that it took me the longest to actually decide I wanted to invest time into. But it's nice, and it's been reminding me that I actually like writing longer-form things, and that the friendslock option is wonderful and makes a lot of life easier.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I agree; I think it could very easily have been a novel About Ead and could have been stronger for it. Actually, I think maybe part of the problem too was that -- I mean, it felt to me kind of like Shannon really wanted to love all her children equally, but actually she very much loved Ead the most, and all the other POV characters are kind of trudging on through these reams of pages that really only have about half of Shannon's attention until the point comes when they intersect with Ead.

[shadaras]

Just having the whole plotline about Ead's magic and her crush on the queen that she doesn't seem aware of at the start and how she's torn between her duty to the queen and duty to the Priory would've been great! That would've probably ended up being one normal-sized fantasy book, and if she really wanted the other worldbuilding stuff she could've used the strategy of beginning each chapter with some in-world text (letters or textbooks or whatever) that would let us know about things, but Ead seemed to know a majority of what was necessary for the "Oh no! Evil dragons are rising and must be stopped!" plot anyway as best I could tell at like 350 pages in.

[skygiants]

She also seemed most interested in the worldbuilding around the Berethnet Queens, too -- like, the coolest thing in the book for me was the backstory around all of Sabine's various ancestors and their different ways of dealing with the constraints of being a ruling queen with the responsibility of producing an heir in a theoretically gender-egalitarian society, she'd clearly spent a *lot *of time building out that history and developing it, and if the book had really just focused in there then all the other worldbuilding would have felt like really neat and expansive hints of a bigger world and I would have been impressed! It's like she put just enough work into all the other parts of the world to make them interesting addendums to the Berethnet storyline, but not quite enough to sustain a close examination when the focus shifted to a different POV who actually lived there.

[shadaras]

Yeah... I got the feeling, sometimes, that the rest of the world stuff was her going "I'm not just writing fantasy Europe! See?", especially with Tane and all the eastern dragon stuff. (Admittedly: I spent a while when reading that going 'What culture are you trying to draw from here, then?', but not quite putting enough effort in to actually figure it out.)

[skygiants]

lol yeah I ALSO got that feeling, the entire Eastern dragon plotline almost felt more like it was being written ... from duty than from pleasure? Which was too bad, because the actual setup for Tané's character -- so ambitious and driven and dutiful that she breaks the number one rule in order to achieve her ambition, and we go from there -- is really interesting and could have been a great arc if that part of the world was fully fleshed out, and if she was interested in prioritizing character over plot for a bit.

[shadaras]

I wish it had been good! I was very excited about the idea of Tané's plot, because I love dragondrider stories -- having one that used eastern dragons instead of western was a cool twist, and letting the women and men be equal in actually becoming dragonriders is still fairly rare. But then they took her dragon away, and, well... if you don't have a dragon to ride, it isn't really a dragonrider plot anymore.

[osprey_archer]

Aw, that sounds so potentially interesting! (And I love the title.) And then such a letdown! Are Ead Duryan and Tané the lesbians, or are there other lesbians floating around somewhere in the 800 pages?

You know, I'm struggling to think of an 800 page book that I read where I felt "You know, that needed every single page. You could not have improved the book by slicing out a couple hundred pages here or there." Maybe the Count of Monte Cristo? At least there's always something happening in The Count of Monte Cristo; Dumas never stops the book dead to share His Thoughts on Napoleon (Hugo and Tolstoy, I'm looking at both of you).

[skygiants]

Ead is one of the lesbians! Spoilers: she ends up falling in love with the queen, which honestly should have been a hundred percent my jam given the fact that I've recently gotten very into Padme Amidala and her handmaiden bodyguards, and instead ... it was fine? But again, the relatively sparse character work meant I never quite understood why they were so drawn to each other in any way beyond the archetypal plot tracks along which they were both progressing.

TRUE, though if I remember The Black Count right, there's an argument to be made that the entirety of The Count of Monte Cristo is Dumas sharing His Thoughts On Napoleon (And What He Did To Dumas Senior, REVENGE!!!) But others really are difficult to think of! The Once and Future King is 650 pages and I love almost all of them, but that doesn't mean that none of them could be sliced ... I also really love Bleak House but I just went to look at my last post about Bleak House and it literally begins "It's way too long."

[larryhammer]

The only other sure thing I can think of is Njal's Saga. It takes something like the third reading to realize that every single incident dovetails into the arc of the overall plot, because there are so many of them, but all are needed to make that arc curve that way.

Middlemarch?

[skygiants]

MAYBE Middlemarch. It's been a while since I read it, but I'm willing to believe that George Eliot is ruthless enough to remove every page she doesn't actually need.

[osprey_archer]

TRUE, The Count of Monte Cristo is absolutely chock full of Dumas' barely sublimated Thoughts on Napoleon, but on the other hand they ARE sublimated into the revenge plot and not suddenly popping up for an entire navel-gazing chapter of "BUT NAPOLEON THOUGH."

[skygiants]

Fair point, well made; perhaps what Hugo and Tolstoy really need is for Edmond Dantes to make their way into their Napoleon chapters, kill Napoleon, and saunter off whistling before they can really get their full head of steam going.

[osprey_archer]

But here I think we've come to the heart of the problem, which is that if any Edmond Dantes type character had tried to take Hugo or Tolstoy's infodumps away from them, either author would have ejected that character from the book with great prejudice. MY INFODUMPS ABOUT WATERLOO/HISTORY WILL REMAIN UNTOUCHED! they would shout.

[skygiants]

I feel like Hugo might have had the faintest grain of self-awareness, given that he has that chapter in Les Mis where Marius starts to go off on a paean to Napoleon and is immediately shot down by Enjolras and Combeferre; if only they had been able to break the fourth wall -

[musesfool]

It was definitely too long, but I still enjoyed a lot of it, though I think more of Ead and the priory and less of annoying alchemist dude would have improved it.

[skygiants]

I spent the entire book genuinely wondering why the alchemist was in it ... a.) at all, b.) as a POV character. What did he do for the plot again? Failed to asssassinate the queen? I mean, good job, I guess?

[sovay]

What did he do for the plot again? Failed to asssassinate the queen?

Did he have a sense of humor?

[skygiants]

He had a sense of deep personal injury that very occasionally manifested itself in self-mockery, which honestly brought him a step closer to a sense of humor than any of the other POV characters ...

[sovay]

He had a sense of deep personal injury that very occasionally manifested itself in self-mockery, which honestly brought him a step closer to a sense of humor than any of the other POV characters ...

I am honestly amazed by the concept of an eight-hundred-page book with no sense of humor. I'm sure they exist beyond this author, but I'm still not sure how it doesn't sneak in even accidentally. Ordinary, unstructured life is frequently quite funny, or at least has a high irony quotient, which is closely related! I feel like you'd have to make a point of keeping it out and why would you do that?

[skygiants]

It puzzled me too! As you know, I'm extremely -- perhaps indeed overly -- capable of finding a lot of things funny, whether or not they were intended to be so, and thence often comes my enjoyment where other enjoyments may pall. But this book is very serious about itself, and is also perfectly competent and not at all ridiculous, thus actually diminishing my personal enjoyment more than if it were somewhat less competent but more entertaining as a result.

[yasaman]

I got like 150 pages in before I gave up because it was still mostly exposition and also like all four of the POV characters were just entirely lacking in personality. If the plot or writing were compelling enough, I'd have kept going, but they emphatically were not. I truly do miss epic fantasy of this same general kind, but damn, give me something worth sticking around for.

[skygiants]

I'd say around the four hundred page mark is about where the book started picking up for me, which is ... too late for a book to pick up, I would say, probably. The characters didn't gain that much more personality but at least at that point they were doing many more things!

[cinaed]

Ha, I checked out the ebook without realizing it was 800 pages, forgot about it until it was due back in three days, and started reading it. Two hours later I switched computers and got the 'you have 20% of the way into this book' notice and went "wait, how long is this-- oh...800 pages...yeah I'm not finishing this in three days."

And honestly didn't really feel disappointed because it was taking so long for all the characters to do anything! (And yeah I paused right around the time the one character who had a sense of humor died, heh.)

[skygiants]

I was SO DETERMINED to finish my copy before it went back to the library that I started reading it a week early, and ... well, I got close? I only returned it a day late, that's not so bad!

(WHY EVEN INTRODUCE HIM IF HE WAS JUST GOING TO DIE IMMEDIATELY)

[sovay]

(WHY EVEN INTRODUCE HIM IF HE WAS JUST GOING TO DIE IMMEDIATELY)

TO BE FAIR THIS WAS MY RELATIONSHIP WTIH MANY CHARACTERS FOR YEARS.

[cinaed]

YEAH, WHY KILL OFF THE FUNNIEST DUDE.

Also, the only other characters I was genuinely invested in was the dragon rider and her potential girlfriend who helped the alchemist in the beginning, and since I did not finish the book I am gonna pretend it worked out fine for them!

[katherine]

Hah, I did similiar with the giant hardcover from the library, except didn't get that far I don't think. I wanted more dragons sooner.

[skygiants]

It takes so many pages for dragons and then the one interesting dragon immediately gets kidnapped and disappears again!

[cinaed]

In hindsight that was also one of my problems. I kept expecting more dragons than there were! There's like this post that floats around about a little girl who reviewed a book about penguins with "This has more information about penguins than I care to know" except for me it's more along the lines of "This has fewer dragons than I hoped for," ha.

[rushthatspeaks]

I was sent this book to review independently by TWO SEPARATE VENUES and so it is taking up literally more than a foot of shelf space. Literally. Must get around to donating my copies, as the amount I would prefer it take up in my house is none. I mean, it wasn't terrible, but.

[skygiants]

It wasn't terrible! It was perfectly fine! It in no way needs to occupy a SOLID FOOT of space in anyone's home where one could fit, for example, an entire Wimsey collection, and get much more joy out of it.

[vass]

only two people in the entire cast of Priory of the Orange Tree ever give any evidence of possessing a sense of humor, in the whole enormous cast of the book, and one of them dies two hundred pages in, and neither of them is the author.

In an alternate universe somewhere, this book was published posthumously in its unfinished form, tragically cut short at two hundred pages with the author's death. It is, however, quite funny.

[skygiants]

It would increase the jokes-to-pagecount ratio from infinitesimally small to something approaching at least two percent...

[sovay]

Meanwhile, the evil dragons are indeed rising

I'm just disappointed in a novel with evil dragons of absolute evil that turn out to be actually evil! Dragons deserve better.

[skygiants]

Absolutely agreed, and the fact that there are Good Dragons too (and that isn't complicated either) doesn't really improve it for me -- fire dragons bad and evil! Water dragons good and virtuous! OK sure I guess?

(The fire dragons also cause PLAGUE.)

[sovay]

fire dragons bad and evil! Water dragons good and virtuous! OK sure I guess?

I mean, that's generically the mythological split between European and Asian dragons, but?

(The fire dragons also cause PLAGUE.)

OF COURSE THEY DO.

[skygiants]

The part that puzzled me is the cosmological reason for the existence of the fire dragons is an elemental imbalance, but the water dragons aren't the result of an imbalance, we're just supposed to have water dragons! But not fire dragons, apparently. PLAGUE!

[dimestore_romeo]

I'm so relieved, because I was attempting the ebook from my library the other week and I just... couldn't do it. There was something about it from the get go that I just kind of thought, if I was thirteen it would be fine, but I'm not.

[skygiants]

EXACTLY. Honestly, would have genuinely loved it if I were thirteen, would have been thrilled (although would not yet have understood why I was thrilled probably) by the high fantasy lesbians, hope many thirteen-year-old girls encounter the high fantasy lesbians and are indeed thrilled by them, but for me I think the moment has passed.

[starlady]

Very glad I wasn't assigned to review this book. I will put the time into reading A Sword Named Truth instead.

[skygiants]

I keep forgetting there's a new Indaverse book somehow! I think it's because I haven't properly decided yet whether to dive right in, or to reread all the Inda books first ...

[cinaed]

THERE'S A NEW INDAVERSE BOOK OUT? Dang it, my Inda books are all at my mom's place... But I AM going down there in a few weeks.

[larryhammer]

evil dragons of absolute evil (so styled in all lowercase) shall be the name of my next Silk Road metal band.

[skygiants]

Perfect! First single title: "They Also Bring Plague"

[chestnut_pod]

Well, I am glad to have seen this, because I was under the clearly erroneous impression that this book was a doom-and-gloom Handmaid's Tale-style dystopic sci-fi. I'm still not going to read it, but I am glad that at least a book about undercover battle nuns exists, simplistic or no.