This was a pretty bad book. I’m surprised because the series is supposed to be one of the greatest. But I couldn’t bear most of it and found it quite boring.
Two books into the series and it still doesn’t qualify as a fantasy. Oh sure there are a few dribblets here and there, but till now it’s just been a political book with some houses fighting each other. I had thought the first book would be the only one which didn’t have fantasy elements, but this one really took the cake.
There are some strong characters though, but Martin’s habit of ponderously moving the plot forward gets irritating. Almost as bad as Robert Jordan. Long tedious descriptions of buildings, places and “stream of consciousness” type of writing makes the action proceed forward at a crawl.
To make matters worse, two of the threads of the story are completely divorced from the rest – those of Jon snow and the horribly boring Daeneyrs. No doubt they merge with the storyline later on, but it’s asking too much for a person to follow three completely disparate storylines.
Like I said, the strong characters and some pretty cool elements like the wolves can make a great book, but many of the main characters hardly advance at all. Robb is missing completely and Arya, though she has the potential to be one of the coolest characters does nothing but get captured.
It’s obvious that Martin has great things in store for Bran, but once again he doles out so little in so many words that I had to flip through page after page barely reading. Of course, I’d like to know what’s going to happen next and so I will continue to do so, but so far, I don’t like the way Martin writes.
I totally agree with your review on ” A Clash Of Kings”. This whole series has been so boring and very frustrating to read.
Since reading the first book I have kept on thinking that the follwing book will start to pick up the speed of the story line but am dissapointed every time I finish another book.
The story line with all of th POV characters seems to just keep jumping back and forth without progressing at all.
I have just finished reading “A Storm Of Swords” and was once again dissapointed.
All I can say really happened was that Arya walked around and gets caught and walks around some more, Jaime walks around and gets caught, Jon Snow walks around, Bran walks around, Robb does nothing much, Tyrion does nothing much, Sansa does nothing much and Daenrys is doing everything very slowly.
On the point of Daenrys I hope her dragons have a big growth spurt because I will not read another 100 of these books waiting for them to get bigger as currently they are still the size of your average dog.
All in all this series sucks and I dont know what all of the hype was about.
Series like ‘ WOT and The Prince Of Nothing ‘ in my opinion blow this out of the water.
In reply to Scott
Thanks for suggesting “The Prince of Nothing!” Putting it on my reading list right now…
Agreed 100% I picked up the books under the impression that author fused Fantasy with life in dark ages but to my appointment there’s no magic in this book, if that wasnt bad enough writer filled pages after pages on castles, wines, sigils, sers and maidens only to kill them unceremoniously, I quit it after second book, it was getting tiresome and painfuly repetitive without any magic or conclusion in sight. People comparing this boring slab of a book with Tolkien!!!
I recommend Jim Butchers Dresden files if you want to read about urban life fused with magic and fantastic creatures!!!!
XXX