Skip to main content

A Letter to 'Priory of the Orange Tree'

Dear Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon,

You have no idea how long I have been waiting for a book like you. A book that realigns itself into my heart, that makes me feel as though I’m merely a passenger in my own story, and forever wandering in the pages of yours. A book that feels so true to who I am and who I want to be. A book that makes me feel as though I’m returning home.   


(Although, honestly, a little less pain would have been appreciated.)


So, what do I love the most about you? I love the scope of your story, from secret societies to warring continents to ancient evils rising from their sleep. I love how you build your own world with inspiration from our own, and have done so with such thorough respect. I love how you are pure escapism, and how you never pretend to be anything else, because isn’t that what fantasy fundamentally is?


But I think, most of all, I love how you are so unstoppably, unyieldingly, unapologetically feminist. Your female characters are allowed to feel, to succeed, to live. They are allowed to be anything they want to be, whether it is a queen or mage or dragon-rider, or just someone struggling to get by. They are given their own journeys – the moments they fall, the moments they survive, and the moments they thrive. They are the protagonists of their own stories, and they are all allowed to be both gloriously heroic and gloriously human.


And honestly, I’m jealous of Tané Miduchi. She represents the fundamental human desire of having a mighty water dragon as your very own emotional support godmother, and that’s just unfair.


And how can I forget the beauty that is the romance between Ead and Sabran? Because honestly, I can’t remember the last time I’ve read a queer relationship that feels so organic to who I am, a queer relationship between a queen and her secret knight who fall in love as they go up against the world. But it’s also in the smaller moments – when they feel drawn to each other, yet have the unmistakable urge to rile each other up. When Ead gives Sabran a rose for sweet dreams, and Sabran kisses her cheek the next morning in thanks. When they whisper to each other in the dark and dance with each other in the light. When they are two women with their own hearts and their own journeys, who understand that love is a choice and choose to love each other every day. 


So, Priory of the Orange Tree, thank you. Thank you for existing. Thank you for writing a story that has ensnared the hearts of so many people across the world, a story that has paved the way for many more stories like it, a story that will be a statement of empowerment for years to come. Thank you for being the closest book a book can be to perfection.  


Love,

Ilisha Tanna

This letter was one of the top ten entries in the P.S. I Love Literature Letter Writing Competition of The Novel Room, our Book Discussion Club. Students wrote letters to characters, writers, poets, books as part of a creative review and response activity, and these were read out in the session on April 29, 2021.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Review of "The Tale of the Rose" by Emma Donaghue

 A Review of "The Tale of the Rose" by Emma Donaghue - Mayura Bhandari “The Tale of The Rose” is a retelling of the popular children’s fairy tale, “The Beauty and The Beast”. It is one of the short stories in the collection by Emma Donoghue, called Kissing The Witch . The story is narrated from the point of a young woman who describes herself as having an appetite for magic. She doesn’t desire suitors, finery or riches. When her father’s ships get lost at sea, her cushy life disappears. But without despair, she gets to work. She washes her father’s clothes, finding peace and satisfaction in it. When fortune smiles upon their family, her siblings ask for riches and finery, but she desires a red rose bud. Her father returns and hands her the rose, explaining that the price of that flower was that he had sold her to a Beast. Obediently, she heads over to the castle, nervous and excited for a new chapter in her life. She recalls the lore the villagers told her. About a young
Post a Comment
Read more

Marxism in Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett, the most eminent Irish playwright wrote ‘’Waiting for Godot’’ in French in 1949 and then translated it into English in 1954. This play has been performed as a drama of the absurd with astonishing success in Europe, America and the rest of the world in the post second world war era. For this reason, Martin Esslin calls it, “One of the successes of the post-war theatre” (Esslin, Martin, 1980) In this play, the two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait expectantly to see a man simply known as Godot, a character who does not make an appearance in the play, despite being the titular character. The play begins with waiting for Godot and ends with waiting for Godot. Marxism refers to the political and economic theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, later developed by their followers to form the basis of communism. Marxism introduced ideas such as Dialectical Materialism, Alienation, and Economic Determination. Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ has a minimalist setting
Post a Comment
Read more

Psychological Analysis Of Waiting For Godot

Psychological criticism adopts the methods of "Reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. Here, we are going to apply the same form of criticism on Samuel Beckett’s play, ‘Waiting for Godot.’  Unanswered questions behind the characters behaviour are answered here. We would be looking further to the psychoanalytical approach, Sigmund Freud being the important proponent here. A major focus on the language and how dreams reflect our mental personality are given in his second essay, “Interpretation of Dreams.” The plot clearly states that Estragon has nightmares and Vladimir never addresses them and remains unhelpful towards it, being the one who is aware about their sufferings. The nightmares contain flashbacks and images of a gruesome and horrific event that has hap
1 comment
Read more