Series: The Roots of Chaos

The Roots of Chaos by Samantha Shannon.

As broad as Game of Thrones but not nearly as deep

Shannon created a pretty interesting world with this series, but unfortunately neglected to fill it with interesting characters. As with most fantasy settings dragons exist and are key to the story, but here they're divided into Wyrms (nasty, evil dragons born of fire) and ... dragons (wise, kind dragons born of starlight).

Wyrms are reviled in Western countries since their religious hegemony (Virturdom, a little on the nose with the naming) is based on the continued existence of their ruling family keeping the Nameless One (the biggest, baddest Wyrm) chained below the waves. Meanwhile Eastern countries worship their dragons as gods, understandable since they seem pretty cool, and in the south there's no particular religion but there is a cult of warrior mages dedicated to eradicating all wyrms who claim to know the true history of Virturdom's founding myth. There's also one extremely (but very ambiguously) powerful with who's kinda a wildcard.

It's an interesting setup, and for most of the book I started with (The Priory of the Orange Tree, first published but 3rd in the chronology) I was very interested in seeing how all these nations and their politics/beliefs interacted. There were plenty of mysteries dangled, many of which were resolved but some I assumed would be handled in other books. There was some slightly ham-fisted writing but eh, not everyone can be George RR Martin. Unfortunately my impresssions of the series started going slightly downhill as A Day of Fallen Night (the much shorter prequel to Priory of the Orange Tree) followed two mostly uninteresting side characters without really connecting to the main story and was completely shattered by Among the Burning Flowers (yet another prequel, this time 500 years earlier).

SPOILER WARNING

After reading this 3rd book I realised some of the mysteries were perhaps mysteries to the author as well. If the Berethnet dynasty is built on a lie with no magical blood, how exactly does Glorian have weird dream chats with Dumai all book? Come to think of it why do they only have a single, female child who looks exactly the same as all their predecessors? I guess something to do with Calanthe but it's never explained, and the other OG witches also had descendants, none of whom share this quality... Why did it take 7 Eastern dragons sacrifcing themselves to take down a single High Western when the West killed 2 with humans, and the comet should've rendered it nearly powerless. Fyredel gave up and flew away rather than just eating or stomping on Glorian, but 7 dragons who could apparently hold their own in a weakened state need to sacrifice themselves to kill a lesser High Western? There's a lot of stuff which just feels unsatisfying.

Speaking of unsatisfying boy are the characters flat. They each have their archetype, telegraphed from a mile away within the first few pages of meeting the, an they stick to it without fail for the entire story. Eadaz from Priory of the Orange Tree was cool as a hyper-competent badass and had at least some character growth/internal conflict, but that's one character and every POV Sister is pretty much exactly the same. You'll never be surprised reading these books, but despite that it still feels like plenty of stuff comes out of nowhere.

I clearly have a lot of criticisms about this series but I also finished it, which took a considerable amount of time. I'd say it's solid grand fantasy junk food; it'll satisfy if you turn your brain off and just go with the flow but thinking about how things work or why they're happening will just lead to disappointment.