And while Game of Thrones compact things a lot, the books have maybe the reverse problem: Martin has spun off in so many different directions, after every breadcrumb path down storyline cul-de-sacs, the extent makes it tough to imagine exactly how everything in drama can potentially coalesce. Current reading: What Are Fantasy Books? Best Full Guide []. Finally, this is the eyesight he sees through to the ending, instead of a hybrid.
Although fans might feel frustrated with how long Martin is shooting to compose The Winds of Winter not had A Dream of Spring and besides the fact that he does not owe anyone anything , his careful and individual plotting should pay dividends in the long term.
And while Martin does have his flaws as a writer, there is more prospect of Hot Pie asserting the Iron Throne or even HBO remaking the whole show than there is of him being accused of rushing the end. Not only is that since a number of these conditions will be different, but due to the kind of those books, which graphs the storylines from particular POV characters. These conclusions will be divisive nevertheless, but Martin is a master of installations and payoffs, and that is what he will send in A Song of Ice and Fire finish that Game of Thrones did not fully handle for everybody.
What exactly have Martin and the showrunners David Benioff and D. Weiss said how tightly the books would suit the series? And have those replies changed over the past six decades? The longer it became apparent that Martin would not complete his last two books before this series, the greater Benioff and Weiss began to talk more openly about how the series and books could end differently.
George R. The End Is Finally in Sight. So no, she is not dead from the books. He may seem different if all someone has read is Tolkien and the authors who ape his style, but that's just one small corner of a very expansive genre. Anyone who thinks Tolkien is the 'father of fantasy' doesn't know enough about the genre to judge what 'originality' means. So, if Martin neither an homage nor an original, I'm not sure what's left. In his attempt to set himself apart, he tore out the joyful heart of fantasy, but failed replace it with anything.
There is no revolutionary voice here, and there is nothing in Martin's book that has not been done better by other authors.
However, there is one thing Martin has done that no other author has been able to do: kill the longrunning High Fantasy series. According to some friends of mine in publishing and some on-the-nose remarks by Caleb Carr in an NPR interview on his own foray into fantasy , Martin's inability to deliver a book on time, combined with his strained relationship with his publisher means that literary agents are no longer accepting manuscripts for high fantasy series--even from recognized authors.
Apparently, Martin is so bad at plot structure that he actually pre-emptively ruined books by other authors. Perhaps it is true what they say about silver linings. Though I declined to finish this book, I'll leave you with a caution compiled from various respectable friends of mine who did continue on: "If you need some kind of closure, avoid this series. No arcs will ever be completed, nothing will ever really change.
The tagline is 'Winter is Coming'--it's not. As the series goes on, there will be more and more characters and diverging plotlines to keep track of, many of them apparently completely unrelated to each other, even as it increasingly becomes just another cliche, fascist 'chosen one' monomyth , like every other fantasy series out there.
If you enjoy a grim, excessively long soap opera with lots of deaths and constant unresolved tension, pick up the series--otherwise, maybe check out the show. View all comments. Sep 27, Shannon rated it did not like it Shelves: not-worth-it , , fantasy.
I really feel the necessity of a bit of personal backstory here, before I start the review. So I started reading this book with the vague idea that it was a flop, and that may not have helped, but I got through pages of it before feeling so crapped off with it that I shoved it in my c I really feel the necessity of a bit of personal backstory here, before I start the review. So I started reading this book with the vague idea that it was a flop, and that may not have helped, but I got through pages of it before feeling so crapped off with it that I shoved it in my cupboard and tried not to think about it.
Page to be exact. More on why later. If you've heard of this book, or read it, you're probably aware that far from being the flop I assumed it was at the time and I didn't know anyone who was reading it , the series has gone on to be one of the big Cash Cows of the fantasy genre. Computer games, role-playing games - there's even a board game that looks like Risk. Sooner or later there'll be a movie or something, no doubt I'm moderately surprised one isn't in the works already.
People love this book and this series. So I'm well aware I'll probably be lynched for this review, because even the people on Goodreads who didn't like it still had great things to say about it. But reviews are subjective, and here's mine. In the vein of Tolkein, Jordan, Elliott, Goodkind, Hobb, Eddings, Feist et al, A Game of Thrones is set in the classicly boring-and-overdone medieval-England-esque setting, and is essentially about a bunch of nobles fighting over a throne.
Very original. Praised for its focus on political intrigue, its lack of magic and similar fantasy tropes, and its cast of believable and interesting characters, I found the book tedious. But there were elements to it that I liked, characters who I felt attached to, enough to read the second book and become hooked, and so on.
I love page long, fat fantasy books. I love huge casts of characters and have no problem keeping up with them. I've read Jennifer Fallon's Wolfblade trilogy and Second Sons Trilogy, both of which are heavy on political intrigue and very low on magic, and they're supurb. A Game of Thrones is not.
It offers nothing new to the genre, and does nothing original with what it has. Narrated in turns by Eddard Ned Stark, Lord of Winterfell; his wife Lady Catelyn; his bastard son Jon Snow; his very young daughters Sansa and Arya; his middle son Bran; Tyrion Lannister, a dwarf and brother to the Queen; and young Daenerys Targaryen, last of the line of dragon kings and exiled to the land beyond the narrow sea, the book is divided into neat chapters headed by the name of one or the other, so you know exactly whose point-of-view you're going to get and where you are in the plot.
Thanks for holding my hand Martin, but I don't like this technique. The chapter headings, I'm referring to. It encourages me to start wondering about the character before I've even started reading. I start imagining things and then have to correct it all as the character is revealed during the chapter. There's power in names, and withholding them or putting elements of a character's personality first is often more compelling, and better writing.
Let me be perfectly straight: I did not find any of the characters to be particularly interesting; though Jaime Lannister had something about him, you hardly ever saw him. They all pretty much felt like the same character, just in different situations.
Ned is all about honour and duty, but especially honour, with love a more minor consideration, but honestly, could the man be more stupid? Eddard's a moron, and dull, and his only saving grace is that he's nice to his daughters.
Let's be clear about something else right here: this world and its people are so sexist and misogynist it's ludicrous. There are many derogatory references to women's tits, metaphors about screwing whores, descriptions of Daenerys getting her nipples pinched by her horrible brother Viserys - not to mention her marriage, at twelve, to a horselord whose men rape women like there's no tomorrow; incest and so on.
The first time I tried to read this book, I was offended and disgusted it didn't help that I'd read Pillars of the Earth not long before; though I did not grow up sexually repressed or prudish or anything like that, I have never found reading descriptions of rape to be all that easy, especially when they're treated so dismissively - yet oddly my impressions of the characters were much more favourable.
I read it now and I just felt contempt. No one character stands out, though Arya has potential. Catelyn is as boring as her husband, and her sister Lysa is, let's face it, mad as a hatter and a sure sign of why women are unfit to rule a clear message in this medieval-esque patriarchal world. Queen Cercei too. Tyrion, the dwarf, seems on the verge of having charisma but fails, and Daenerys I want to like someone , but Martin doesn't give his characters any depth.
Sure, they're all flawed and a flawed character is a great literary device - the anti-hero, etc. The plot is also pretty weak. A bildungsroman does wonders - yes, let me see the characters on a journey of life rather than a quest, quests are tired. There's no quest in A Game of Thrones , and that's fine with me. But what is there?
Jon goes to the Wall that separates the wilderness from the Seven Kingdoms why is it called the Seven Kingdoms when there's only one kingdom? And swords with names, seriously, what's with that?
I'm so sick of such blatant phallic symbols and their representations, and the whole creed of honour and duty and gallant knights What frustrates me most is that this could have been a really interesting story, if only the author had better talent at writing characters - or letting them write themselves. The plot is not the problem, though it's largely uneventful, with no climactic moments because even those are written at the same pace as the rest, with no drammatic flourishes come on, we all like those, let's be honest.
There's no atmosphere in this book. There're a few bad lines, like "A storm of rose petals blew across a blood-streaked sky, as blue as the eyes of death" p. Olyvar Frey held his horse for him, Lord Walder's son, two years older than Robb, and ten years younger and more anxious.
On the plus side, there were a few things I liked. The direwolves - large ferocious animals as constant companions and protectors: always a winner with me; the intriguing climate, where summer and winter lasts years, decades even, before changing how does that work? Seriously, what do they eat? In many fantasy books my problem is the whole good vs. Here, my problem is that the characters are so black-and-white. They are described, good, that's settled, now what? There's no grey.
No character development. They never once surprised me. I honestly don't know if I'll read the next book. The Wheel of Time taught me at the same age as I first tried reading this book, 16 that the first book in a series can be the weakest, because of the amount of extrapolation and background etc. I didn't find that problem here, it was very grounded in the now, which makes me think the next book will be more of the same.
You know what it reminds me of? If you like Arthurian fantasy, and that kind of style, then this would be a good book for you: the excessively patriarchal culture, the battles, the hint of magic and something glorious lurking around the edges but never coming to the fore, it's all here, neatly packaged.
Obviously it works for a lot of people. But to all those people who say that Martin has opened up the genre in new ways, that he is the best writer of the epic fantasy crowd and so on, I have to wonder, have they read anything else? And then I wonder whether it's a matter of which author you read first and grow attached to, and so compare all the others. I don't think I fell into that trap as such, because Jordan's lost the plot, literally, Goodkind's personal politics and propaganda have taken over his story, and the one epic fantasy series that I love above all others - to date - is Kate Elliott's Crown of Stars series, which I didn't start reading till I was in uni.
But I really wonder, how this story grabbed other people. If it grabbed you, I'd love to hear how and why, because sometimes I feel like I'm too jaded or something, too snobby maybe Feb 04, Kogiopsis rated it did not like it Shelves: blech-ugh-blech , reviewed , not-for-the-sensitive , what-the-fuck-was-this-shit , inconsistent-characterization , incoherent-anger , needed-more-editor , needless-fucking-drama , pacing-pacing-pacing.
Ten years and five hundred comments later and men still think I care if they disagree with me. It will probably make you angry. Heaven knows that the book made me furious, and I intend to turn every bit of that wrath back on it. Instead, I suggest you read karen's review , Brigid's review , Joyzi's review , or any other of the gushing four and five-star reviews here. If video reviews are more your style, I sug Ten years and five hundred comments later and men still think I care if they disagree with me.
If video reviews are more your style, I suggest Melina Pendulum's vlog about this book. Realistically, I know a lot of you are not going to listen, which is why the edit is here. At least it will slow you down a little. EDIT: adding one more thing because, despite the warning and the redirect links I kindly provided, I have indeed gotten the kind of sexist bullshit comments I anticipated. Um, yikes. YIKES, you guys. For example, most people seem fine without accurate portrayal of what personal hygiene was really like in CE in their medieval fantasy media.
Newsflash: realistically, Robb Stark and Jon Snow rarely bathed or brushed their teeth or hair. In real life, people have to go to the bathroom. Well, guess what: bigotry is also boring and gross. But everyone is just dying to keep that in the script. Here's the scoop on this review. For a book that I hate, I usually write a lot. After suffering for several hundred pages, I have pleeeenty of things to say.
I've never hated a book that was quite as long as this one quite as much as I do, so I've had to alter my review so that I can say everything I want to without going over the character limit. The first part is an unorganized rant. I marked pages with particularly annoying quotes on them; for these rants, I broke the book into segments of pages and wrote up quotes and responses for each segment into separate blog posts.
These are all linked below. The second part will be a more organized rant masquerading as a review. There are books I loathe. And then I wanted to like this. I wanted it to be as excellent as so many people insist it is. There are some books that I went into expecting them to be horrible, but this isn't one of them. Oh, my hopes were high here - it was recommended by a plethora of great authors, including the guys of Writing Excuses , who I absolutely love.
Reviewers who I greatly respect rated it four and five stars and wrote at length about how awesome it was. Other people praised the book as "the greatest achievement of the fantasy genre so far" and Martin as "the greatest fantasy writer of all time". It's those last two that are most important, I think, because I love the fantasy genre - always have, and hopefully always will.
Fantasy is what got me into reading well, Harry Potter, specifically and it's been one of my mainstays for as long as I can remember. I bought this book in large part because it was so often touted as, if not always the greatest achievement of the genre, one of the major works of fantasy published in our time. Having recently read several works by Brandon Sanderson, all of which were innovative, highly readable, and deeply philosophical, I was excited to see what Martin by all reports an even better writer than Sanderson could do.
I expected my mind to be blown, repeatedly, and to be faced with the challenge of writing a review for a book so staggeringly brilliant that I could hardly think straight after finishing it. That is far, far, far from what I got. First of all, this book is definitely not what I think of when I hear the word 'fantasy'. It's certainly far from my definition of 'high fantasy'. Now, I realize that my definition of 'high fantasy', which includes pervasive magic, unusual creatures, and a setting that is vividly far from the real world, is not the definition you'll find if you look the term up online.
I also don't care. Seeing as the critical definition appears to characterize high fantasy solely by the fact that it doesn't take place on our Earth, and as this definition is written as if high fantasy and sword-and-sorcery are mutually exclusive, I'm inclined to conclude that whoever wrote said definition is pretty damn stupid and carry on with my own outlines of what makes fantasy high, low, urban, epic, or any other subcategory or combination thereof.
That said - this book? High fantasy? Not as far as I'm concerned. It is, to say the least, distinctly lacking in the requisite elements of the fantastic.
Is it possible that Martin is going for a 'the magic comes back' subplot over the course of the series? Do I give two shits about the rest of the series? This book comes off as a pathetic attempt at fantasy by someone who doesn't really care about the genre, or doesn't know much about it.
It mostly struck me more as an alternate universe War of the Roses fanfiction, with some hints of magic thrown in in a halfassed attempt to give it a place on the genre fiction shelves of bookstores. You can explain to me over and over how Martin intended to make his world 'gritty' and 'realistic' and I will tell you over and over that that shouldn't matter : that it is possible to have a fantasy which is gritty, realistic, and also utterly fantastical.
It's even possible to do it without losing the particular areas where Martin seemed to be trying for gritty realism: since he chose to make all of his characters of the nobility anyhow, he wouldn't have had to worry about overglorifying the lives of the peasantry, as one might with a more economically diverse cast.
Now, I'm willing to give Martin the benefit of the doubt a little bit on the possibility of the 'magic comes back' thing, because there did seem to be elements here that could become fantastical if fully explained later.
The problem, of course, is that they're tossed out without background, let alone proper explanation, and so feel jarring and out of place - not a coherent part of the world, but bits tossed in to be linked together later.
Right now And yeah, maybe part of why I'm so sore about this is that, like I said, I started this book not long after reading some Sanderson, and Sanderson is basically the king of seamless, fantastical, elegant worldbuilding, so pretty much anyone looks bad in comparison, but still.
If I had to assign this book to a genre, I'd call it 'low fantasy', because as far as I'm concerned it was running too low on the qualities that make fantasy what it is.
It's about as much fantasy as fanfiction that translates characters to the modern day is - namely, basically mundane with a miniscule twist. The characters of this book also stand out There are a lot of them - eight POVs and plenty more on the side - and not a single one of them is likeable.
They all had the potential to be, which makes it worse. Bran, the Stark boy who learns too much and is crippled as a result, could have an interesting arc if it weren't so slow and drawn-out. The hints of genuine pathos-inducing story are definitely there. They're also present in the chapters focused on Catelyn, who is the closest Martin gets to a truly nuanced character.
Ned Stark, Catelyn's husband, is supposed to be the noble one - too bad his 'nobility' comes off as stupidity instead. Are you secretly a fourteen year-old girl writing horrendous anime fanfic or something? Answer: no, and the comparison is insulting to fourteen year-old girls. Arya is by far the most entertaining of the Starks, but only because she fulfills all sorts of rebellious-noble-girl-learns-to-fight tropes that I'm quite fond of. Sansa 's chapters made me set the book down for days on end; she is beyond a shadow of a doubt the most insipid, annoying, airheaded character I have ever read and she has not a single whisper of a redeeming quality.
Tyrion Lannister is what Jon Snow could have become without the heapings of Gary Stu in his youth: a bitter middle-aged man with father issues who turns to sex and crudity as his only defense; somewhat akin to Catelyn, he had the potential to be interesting and nuanced if his behavior hadn't been played dead straight. And there's one more: Daenerys Targaryen. Oh, Dany, Dany, Dany. I could write a dissertation on Dany and everything that went wrong with her story - but I don't have that kind of time.
For those of you not familiar with this most epic of George R. Martin's characterization and plot failures, here is a summary: oh and spoilers, but I honestly can't be bothered to tag it. When we first meet her, Dany is thirteen years ond and about to be sold effectively into marriage with Khal Drogo, a warlord of the Dothraki people, by her abusive and not-a-little-bit-crazy brother, Viserys. Viserys has convinced himself that Drogo will help him take back 'his' kingdom - this being the Seven Kingdoms where the rest of the book takes place - hence the whole 'selling his sister to be raped by married to someone he obviously sees as a barbarian' thing.
The marriage occurs, and then the wedding night in truly squicky half-detail. There then follows a long journey across the plains to a Dothraki city, during which Dany is raped and no, I will not call it anything else by Drogo. By her fourteenth birthday she is pregnant. When they arrive in the Dothraki city, Viserys makes such an ass of himself that Drogo kills him by pouring molten gold over his head in the middle of a feasting hall. Robert, the current king of the Seven Kingdoms who the Targaryens see as a usurper, sends assassins to kill Dany - naturally, they fail - and Drogo gets so angry at this that he decides to commit all his people to attacking the Seven Kingdoms in retribution.
They leave the Dothraki city at this point Dany is heavily pregnant and go out to wreak havoc across the countryside on their way to conquest.
In one such battle Drogo is wounded; because he refuses to care for the wound properly, it gets infected. When it is clear that he is going to die, Dany appeals to an old woman to perform forbidden magic to save him; the rest of Drogo's people do not approve and try to cast Dany out. End result: Dany loses her child to create a Drogo-zombie, which she then smothers. When his body is placed on the traditional pyre, she adds in three supposedly dead dragon eggs given to her as wedding gifts and which any fool could see hundreds of pages off were bound to hatch and, surprise surprise, they hatch.
To which my primary objections are: 1. The blinding obviousness of the ending 2. The fact that this single plotline - this single POV among eight - is so far distant from and so barely related to the others 3. The fact that Dany being raped is never treated as what it is, and that the relationship between her and Drogo is portrayed as love.
The first two are self-explanatory; the third, of course, is the big thorny problem. Now, I can sort of understand the perspective which argues that Dany is taking control of her sexuality - she comes to enjoy sex and even to initiate and control it at times. There's a reason that such a concept as an 'age of consent' exists - there is an age at which teenagers are genuinely immature and probably shouldn't be making life-changing decisions like, say, things that could get them pregnant.
Now, I understand that in the medieval times like those that this book is based on, girls were getting married and having children a lot earlier, and that people in general were more mature at an early age. However, Dany shows none of that maturity until after she's been with Drogo for weeks - if not months.
When she's married to him, she is if anything unusually innocent for her age. It's a little hard for me to accept the idea that she's taking control of her sexuality when she's so young and clueless that her first sexual experience is a choice only inasmuch as she chooses not to fight back. Not fighting back, by the way, doesn't mean it's not rape, particularly in the situation that Dany is in vastly younger than Drogo, vastly weaker, browbeaten by her abusive brother and told over and over that her obligation is to do whatever her husband wants.
Nor are her later sexual experiences ones of choice; in fact, it is explicitly stated that even when she had horrible saddle sores and could barely walk, she was expected to be available for sex and treated as such.
If anything, her eventual enjoyment of it seems more like a psychological block put up as a survival tactic than genuine pleasure in the act or love for Drogo. Yet, despite the fact that this situation is obviously, beyond a shadow of a doubt, rape, it's never addressed in-text. If anything, it's portrayed as a positive experience for Dany, one that makes her stronger and enables her to stand up for herself.
Stupid me; I thought that the cancerous expansion of rape-as-love was limited to abusive jackass love interests in YA paranormal romances; clearly, I was wrong. It's everywhere, people. We are all completely fucking doomed. Which brings me to one of the other major frustrations I had with this book: the sex.
I thought reading some of the V'lane bits of Darkfever while sitting next to my mother on the plane was uncomfortable; to my utter shock, that was nothing compared to reading the sex scenes of this book alone. No worry about someone looking over my shoulder and reading about MacKayla Lane getting hot and bothered - and yet even more awkward. Well, as one reviewer put it and I wish I could remember who to give them credit , they're written kind of as if they're these tremendous mythic events.
I cringe at the very thought of quoting them, but to give you a little idea of what they're like Just to be sure you feel my pain. This book felt male-oriented in a way that is so painfully forced that it made me distinctly uncomfortable. I don't mean that women can't enjoy it - obviously, as all the reviews I linked back at the top demonstrate, they can and they do. I mean that the book itself felt as if it were written for the most stereotypical male audience imaginable.
As Tatiana described it, it reads like a soap opera for men. Because MEN want lots of violence, sex, swearing by female genitalia, and paper-thin motivations, right?
Which is exactly what Martin dishes up. I thought at around the halfway point that I'd finish the book and be able to watch the HBO show to get the rest of the series without suffering through more awkwardly described sex scenes not to mention the rest of it.
By the time I finished, though, I had developed such a virulent hatred for this book, its author, and everything related to either of the above that I start grinding my teeth just reading praise for it.
Watching the show would be vastly to my detriment - mostly because neither my hand nor my bank account would do well after I put my fist through the screen of my laptop. It's more than half the reason he's so beloved. This book is gripping, but in a horrifying sort of way. Shocking things happen, you're left traumatized and in tears, but at the same time, you can't bear to stop reading. Focusing more on the lesser characters of the Seven Kingdoms, A Feast for Crows continues with the themes of royal intrigue, plotting and betrayal.
Legendary stories of the conquests of Princess Daenerys grow more epic in their re-telling, as she continues to defeat her enemies in Essos. Meanwhile, the bloodshed of the previous novel has left a power vacuum within the kingdoms, leaving royal households and their many rivals scrambling for power and greater military advantage. This lust for power results in a kidnapping, the unwise revival of a disbanded military order and a kingsmoot calculated to provide the Iron Islands with a new king.
Reader Reviews: Not rating quite as high with fans as previous books in the series, but still a respectable 4 out of 5 stars on goodreads. Unfortunately, you can tell. The story is filled with the missing main characters, unfulfilled plot lines and just an enduring sense that is necessary to the development of the series.
In a departure from the previous novels, the fifth book in the Game of Thrones book order takes place concurrently with its predecessor and focuses on some of the characters whose stories were omitted from the previous book. Jon Snow is shown struggling with hard choices as the new Lord Commander of the Night Watch, facing a looming and deadly threat to the North. In the South, Daenerys has declared herself Queen, but after finding her new subjects opposed to her liberal policies, she agrees to marry in an effort to stop the bloodshed.
The year-old author said he didn't expect the series to catch up with him so quickly. I never thought they would catch up with me, but they did. Martin added that, once the show outpaced the novels, showrunners had to take matters into their own hands over how the series would conclude.
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