My first 5-star read of the year! I liked The Priory of the Orange Tree a bit more because I was 100% engaged all the way through, and with this prequel my engagement dipped occasionally, but it was still excellent. In some ways it was easier to settle into the world because we already know the basics from Priory, though there will still a lot of names and titles to adjust to.
One of the things I really loved was seeing the differences between the world now compared to 500 years in the future when Priory takes place; in particular, there was a country that doesn’t exist in Priory, and there is different ruling system for Seiiki. From an intellectual and political standpoint, it was cool to see how and why the changes happened.
What had drawn me to Priory, in addition to the excellent world-building, was the characters, and that was even more so the case in A Day of Fallen Night. I was so interested in and genuinely liked so many of the characters. They all seem to be genuinely good people who are trying their best. In fact, there were no “storyteller” characters that I disliked this time around. And I really loved that this is a queernorm world. While some of the characters are expected to have heterosexual relationships for procreation purposes (which comes with its own issues), all kinds of relationships, genders, and sexual orientations are included.
Samantha Shannon has said that the books in this series can be read in almost any order, and I can see that. I actually don’t think that one way would be better than another, but I can see how different reading orders might bring up different emotions based on characters you might miss from the past or, in this case, being sad that things won’t change for one particular country for a long time. It gave the book a bittersweet quality at times. I’m so glad I read this one.
