I am perhaps the biggest advocate of fat books, and Priory of the Orange Tree is one of the most popular big books to be released in recent years. When it first released, it was all over my FYP with popular creators hyping up both the story and the characters, but always with that caveat of “it’s very long”. As if length is a bad thing to have in a book. I know for some, a book’s length is intimidating, making them too scared to even start, no matter how appealing the content may be.
Priory of the Orange Tree is a 1000-page goliath fantasy book that has practically anything a young adult reader and fantasy lover could ever ask for. There are incredibly cool dragons, a political intrigue plot with seemingly doomed-by-the-narrative lesbians, an adventure across the land, and a dazzling cast of characters with POV switches that all join up at the end for an epic battle.
When I read this book in my sophomore year of high school, I had plenty of time to read it. I had returned back to in-person school while some kids were still virtual, and it was honestly a really sad time. Lessons were stilted and often awkward because of the half-zoom, half-in-person components; it was impossible to really make friends or talk to people, so I mostly just felt really alone. Instead I did what any good self-respecting bookworm would do: I read, constantly. I’ve always been an incredibly fast reader, and during COVID-19, this just grew exponentially to the point where I would start out every day with a new book which I would start to read on the bus to school, and would usually finish on the bus ride home. Every spare moment in class, in the hallways, during any form of break or downtime would be spent reading, because it was my only escape. What made Priory of the Orange Tree so special to me is that its length meant I got to spend a week, rather than just a day, in its world. Rather than taking a day trip away from sterile classrooms, I got to escape for an entire week into a world with dragons, matrilineal Queendoms, and secret societies of witches.
Reading is the very best form of escapism. That’s not just my opinion; in my heart, it’s a fact. If I’m watching a show or a movie, I am inherently disengaged. I’m not sharing a world with these characters, I’m just watching it play out in front of me. Video games are a medium that come close, particularly when text is involved and interactive branching narratives are touched upon. But reading makes you directly a part of the experience. When I read a book, I cease to be anything but a vessel that witnesses something incredible. To use less pretentious language, reading is fun because you look down at words, black out, and vividly hallucinate an entire world and life, and come to four hours later with the same feeling that happens when you take a 3 p.m. nap and wake up at 10 p.m. It is so wonderful and literally nothing can compare to it.
If you love that feeling as much as I do, savor the big books because they make that feeling last the longest. I highly recommend reading the Priory of the Orange Tree.
