mirijinreads

📖 may, in frames 🌿

5 books. all of them stayed.

⭐ the everlasting + alchemised became 100-star reads 🥀 because they showed me how far people will go just to make their loved one feel chosen

I've been wanting to write about this book for a while now — partly because it's been sitting with me, and partly because I needed the time to process just how big it is. Priory isn't the kind of book you breeze through. It asks you to slow down, learn its language, and trust that the weight of those first hundred pages will pay off. And it does. God, it does.

If I'm being honest, I almost gave up early. The world Shannon builds is dense — names, kingdoms, religions that contradict each other, dragons that mean something different depending on which sea you live near. But once it clicked, it didn't just unlock the story — it unlocked something quieter. The realization that history is never told evenly. That the people we remember as heroes were often chosen for us by someone with a pen and a stake in the outcome. And that the women carrying the heaviest part of the world have, for centuries, been written out of it.

Ead is the one I held onto. Quiet, torn between loyalty and truth, carrying so much in silence — the kind of strength that doesn't need to announce itself to be real. Her journey wasn't loud. There were no big speeches, no dramatic declarations. Just a woman making impossible choices and bearing the weight of them, over and over, because that's what the world asked of her.

The scene that broke me wasn't a battle. It was the quiet one — when duty and love collided, and a choice was made that couldn't be undone. No explosions. No swords clashing. Just heartbreak that lingered far longer than any war scene could. Shannon understands something a lot of fantasy doesn't: the deepest wounds don't bleed loud.

And the line — "No woman should be made to fear that she was not enough." — I had to stop reading after that one. It's the kind of sentence that doesn't just belong to the story. It belongs to every woman who has ever quietly questioned whether she was enough — as a daughter, a friend, a partner, a believer. I sat with that one for a long time.

Priory is dense. It's slow. It's not a book that begs to be loved. But it's a book that stays. It feels less like a fantasy novel and more like a forgotten history finally being written down — heavy with dragons and faith, yes, but heavier still with the quiet power of women who refuse to be erased.

⭐ 4.5 / 5