Priory never fully drew me in despite my love of ensemble casts and sprawling fantasy worlds. Even with the length of the book, none of the POV characters really shine - Ead comes the closest - which is a shame because at least three out of four of them have strong drives that, on the surface, seem deeply interesting. I think Tané suffers the most from this: her story is compelling, her flaw is logical and painful, but she spends most of the book separated from the other POV characters and ends up in a sort of suspended animation until someone swings her way.
A lot of convenient things happen in this book. Plot problems (whether they're creating or resolving a character's problem) are solved so neatly so often that I never felt a sense of expectation or anticipation for what was going to happen, whether beneficial or harmful. Overall, despite the scale of the story, its delivery just didn't work for me. Which, again, is a shame: Priory offers up a continuum of queer stories and takes a deliberate shot at not retelling the same white-centered epic that proliferates the genre. I don't think it pushed the envelope nearly as far as it could've in either of those categories given the narrative scope, but they were nonetheless tentpoles of the story.
I started Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim shortly after finishing Priory. At first blush, I was annoyed by the ironic sense that the story voice had. I can appreciate mimicking the way that fairytales are told - they require a layer of irony - but it sometimes came across as too childish for a sixteen/seventeen-year-old. The childish aspect may have been deliberate, however; it seems that the irony eased as the story went on (or maybe I got used to it). Like with Priory, outside forces often came in to move Shirori through the plot - too often for this kind of story,* those outside forces were Some Dude (TM).
*It was my sense that SCC meant to play with or otherwise subvert many fairytale tropes and cliches. Instead, very few of the character tropes used in the story are turned on their heads, making all but one of the antagonists completely flat. The one character archetype that was established and then subverted was done quite well, which made me wish all the more that it happened more often. The story itself - its component pieces - was interesting enough, but I don't know if Shiori quite came into her power like I was hoping. I have a hold on the second book, so I have some time to decide if it's worth plunging back into the world of dragons and demons.
☆ ★ ☆
For the time being, I'm back to nonfiction with Landscapes for Writers and Game Masters by Scott Rice-Snow. It's one of those books like Turning Tables that my library has unlimited copies of, so I may end up dipping in and out of it. 'Til then, talk2hand
