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The Priory of the Orange Tree

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The Priory of the Orange Tree

By: Samantha Shannon
Narrated by: Liyah Summers
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About this listen

A world divided.
A queendom without an heir.
An ancient enemy awakens.

The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction - but assassins are getting closer to her door.

Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic.

Across the dark sea, Tané has trained to be a dragonrider since she was a child but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel. Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.

©2017 Bloomsbury (P)2019 Audible, Ltd Coming of Age Epic Epic Fantasy Fantasy Fiction Genre Fiction LGBTQIA+ Creators Magic

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All stars
Most relevant
Anyone making it as far as my review, please note you should listen to this audiobook straight away and if you don’t get on with it, you can ask for a refund within seven days.

With so many new unusual names, places, and other organisations, in true brilliant Samantha Shannon style, it was essential to get an excellent narrator. Sadly despite pretty good accents mostly, this narrator does not have what it takes with frequent mispronunciations of certain words that take your head out of the book whilst you work out what it is supposed to be. ‪Wish I’d gone for actual book. Hard to listen to. Eg ‘drought instead of draught (draft). ‘Her conversation’ instead of ‘her conversion etc. Shame.‬

This is the email I sent to audible -
Hi I usually buy a lot of books and then gradually get through them. You will see that from my record.

Sadly the Priory of the orange tree has the worst narrator I have heard in a long while. For all the reasons listed on the many bad reviews.
Eg
POMndah instead of PomANDer
Intelligent (sah) Instead of ‘intelligenzia’
Atonomist instead of anatomist
Acrostic instead of agnostic
Drought instead of draught (draft)
She does some quite good accents, but her male voices are very poor and the key voice of the Dragon just sounded like someone taking the mick.

Is there anyway you can let Samantha Shannon and the producer know that she should re-record this as it will just continue to get terrible reviews and I’m sure people will get refunds? I loved her other books, the bone season series, but cannot get past the terrible pronunciation by this awful narrator. Her dialogue is 3/5 but her pronunciation of some of the words is 0/5, and her ability to appear as though she has never even heard some of the (regular English) words before, is unbelievable.

I note this is the first book on audible that this narrator has done, I hope it’s the only one. I will be avoiding her like the plague

Shame about pronunciation

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First to clarify the title - I found it refreshing to find a book with a good, engaging story and characters who (some of them) also happen to be gay. Sometimes it takes up the centre of a story a bit too much in my opinion. I enjoyed this book, and recommend it. The only thing that would've made it a bit better in my opinion would've been a cast of different people to tell the characters apart a bit better, but the single narrator does a fantastic job by herself. A few things were a bit predictable and I rolled my eyes a few times but overall I did really enjoy it.

Good story, pleasant narrator, not overly lgbt

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This book is not bad but that's about the best one can say for it. The characters are two-dimensional at best, having no goals, only motivation from their pasts. The world-building is sloppy, copying settings from the real world with very little alteration and no explanation. It feels like the author is relying on real-world stereotypes to tell us about her invented world. The biggest problem is that there are three main plots and several minor plots that take place in different parts of the world with different sets of characters. This necessarily means that none of them get the time and space they need to breathe. Simply splitting this story into three books of ~500 pages each should have improved the thing.

Should have been a trilogy

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Narrator makes this really enjoyable. Loved the story as well. With stories of this length, all parts we're engaging. Performance of the narrator was really top notch. I want them to narrator my life if that was possible. definitely give this a read

Superb

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Despite having a great idea it was dragged on for far too long. In the beginning I didn't mind the slow pace as it allows for world building, but halfway through the book lost my interest more and more. The last quarter of the book I had to just push through it to get it done, eventho it was supposed to be the most exciting part with the final battle etc.... what a shame. The whole book should've been 25% shorter. An editor should've made that happen!
The reader is good.

The book is too long

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