2021 book 180

 Samantha Shannon's The Priory of the Orange Tree

I’ve honestly had this on my kindle for like two years, but every time I started it I was kind of meh about it and read something else instead. But recently I downloaded tiktok and basically all the videos I see are queer book recommendations, and like 90 percent of them feature this book! And I was up for an 800 page fantasy novel! So this does have some queer characters but the romance is pretty minimal; there’s mainly lots of politics between countries with different religions that all hate each other, and a lot of pro-dragon vs anti-dragon sentiment, and good and evil dragons, etc. I really liked most of the characters here, and all but one of the POV characters were really interesting and had fun arcs (I still don’t see the point of the alchemist character). Parts of this were a little slow but it builds to a pretty satisfying climax (maybe more so if you are more into battle scenes than I am). It was fine but I didn’t end up LOVING it, B+ I guess?