Just like 'Priory', A Day of Fallen Night suffers from pacing issues and a quick resolution to 800 pages of intrigue. Still, amazing read. 

priory of the orange tree set the world up beautifully and a day of fallen night built on that, even though we see 200 years into the past! the intertwining with priory’s future was really well done, and the inclusion of lgbtq+ folks into more of the story was incredible. TWO wlw relationship! TWO!!!! and one of them was comprised of OLDER WOMEN! it was fantastic.

the pacing was excellent, easing a person into the world again before taking off. relationships were complex and interesting, and a lot of anxieties the characters experience are so real and relatable. 

anyhow! i loved this book!!!!!!! 

A Day of Fallen Night is an improvement over The Priory of the Orange Tree in nearly every way. It would take a long time to enumerate all the positive changes, but a few in short: The pacing is better, the diversity is better, the appeal to modern audiences is better, the feminist themes are clearer, and even the cover art is better! Priory's Eastern branch lagged, but the branches are deftly balanced in Fallen Night. The book remediates Priory's odd penchant for mostly only mentioning the skin type of white characters, and features a significant number of LGBT+ (every letter of the acronym! and then some!) main and secondary characters. It draws on contemporary writing trends from other adult-genre books and, seemingly, fanfiction ("It's too cold, we have to cuddle for warmth") to excellent effect. And women's issues, most notably issues of pregnancy and birth, feature far more prominently, with the noble requirement to sustain a bloodline playing a role throughout the book.

This mandate to procreate establishes this book as far more clearly feminist (the idea that women have issues, interests, and stories worth hearing as much as men do) than its sequel. The need for nobility to sustain itself through childbirth is a recurring, central issue of the book, among other issues which concern women more than they do men, which also make frequent appearances.

In some ways, this book feels like it was written to an audience that might be into medieval court drama or epic adventures, but aren't too fond of the biases that pervade those genres. It is a grand epic, fantastically wrote, including women, LGBT+ characters, and people of color as equals to men, cishet, and white characters.

There are only a few places where it falters. The biggest problem I had is that the action scenes are confusing. I found myself frequently struggling to imagine the scene, re-reading portions over and over again. At first I thought it was a me issue, but after a half-dozen or so times, I figured it's probably not a me problem.

Additionally, I flagged two more minor concerns. First, with the presence of so many LGBT+ characters, the lack of transfeminine characters stands out oddly. Perhaps one or both of the nonbinary characters in the book are intended to be transfeminine, but there is no way to know this from the text. I don't make any guesses as to why; it just sits weirdly. Secondly, while *Priory* is a truly self-contained work, *Fallen Night* hints at an intention to write another book set between the two. This is the only change which I find to be a step backwards from *Priory*.

When layered inside an over 800 page grand adventure, these issues are minor, thus my score of 4.75/5. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in grand adventures, feminist fiction, fantasy, or fiction with LGBT+ main characters.

Wow, what a story! Darker and more brutal than Priory, but beautiful and wise as well. A great foundation for the Roots of Chaos series.