The Priory of the Orange Tree: THE MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER (The Roots of Chaos)

Dieses Buch ist ein absoluter Bestseller und eine fantastische Lektüre, die mich sofort in die Welt von Samantha Shannon entführt. Die Geschichte ist fesselnd und die Charaktere sind unglaublich gut entwickelt.

Super!

Honestly, I am quite cautious when it comes to Fantasy Books. I have been disappointed so many times. Either the storyline was lacking any plausibility/tension, or the characters were not likeable or interesting.But this book has it all. At the beginning it is difficult to remember all the names and places, but I got the hang of it.There is romance in it, heartwarming, believable romance. Not too much, which is good.The story is not new, villain has come to destroy the world once more after 1000 years of slumber, we have heard it often. Still, it was riveting. I enjoyed it. The characters were interesting, their development as well. The picture painted by the author of the world the story takes place is fantastic. Well done. I look forward to the next books from Samantha.

This is an epic fantasy story put into one book, something pretty rare in a world of series, so it gets points from me for that alone. The 800 pages cover the story of four characters and through them, a focal point in time for the various realms of this world.There is Ead, a member of the secret Priory of the Orange Tree, who is under cover at queen Sabran the ninth‘s court in Inys to protect her from assassins. Then there is Tané in the east, who strives to be a dragon rider, Lord Artheloth of Inys, who finds himself the victim of political machinations that drag him across the world to the east and lastly, Niclays Roos, an alchemist from Mentedon, who got exiled to the east for conning a queen. Their stories converge at some point, because all realms face the same threat: the possible re-awakening of the Nameless One, a dragon made of the fire of the earth itself that nearly ended the whole world a thousand years ago.The four characters go on their own paths towards the nearing apocalypse for most of the story, it’s the last chapters that their ways converge, when the last stand of humankind is made.The showdown was a bit anticlimactic after the hundreds of pages of build-up, but it was OK. Although I whished, the whole thing was a bit more evenly paced: there is hundreds of pages of descriptions of the dull everyday life at the Inys court, for example, and hundreds of pages of the main characters brooding, and then there is a rush towards the end. I have to admit that I had to drag myself back to reading for a huge part of the story, some parts of it were pretty boring. Then there was my problem with Nicklays Roos, a character I so detested that I finally skipped the chapters about him. I have to admit that I now pretty much nothing about his thread in this story, for I didn’t find it in me to care (and I still don’t).I liked Ead a lot as a character, Tané as well, but the latter wasn’t fleshed-out too well. Ead is someone who makes a great heroine, but beside her, most other characters fell flat.The world building is very good, I liked how the various religions have their roots in the same events, yet are so vastly different from each other, sometimes the exact opposite. And the build-up of the mystery, the secrets and betrayals, was downright brilliantly done.So overall, it’s s mostly good story and if it weren‘t for the too long parts of non-action, I would have loved it without any reservation.