“This series started off strong. Very strong. I loved the characters and, though there were an awful lot of them, fairly quickly learned who they all were and began to build attachments to them. Strongest of all to the Starks who play a central role in the first book and includes, in Arya Stark, my absolutely favorite character type: strong, capable, young girl.
That Martin dispensed with characters violently and, often, surprisingly, only served to heighten the stakes in this game of thrones.
This continued through the next two books, but utterly failed in the fourth. Martin leaves out most of my favorite characters in order to split a 1500+ page book into two separated, not chronologically, but by characters (each chapter in his books focuses on one character.) As a result, I have had to wait more than two years to find out what happens to my favorites and fill in the blanks of events that I've already read about.
But that's not the unforgivable part. What I can't stand about this book is the level to which Martin has heightened the violence. I nearly put the book down several times simply because of the sadistically gruesome ways that he has elected to kill people off and torture them. "Medieval murder porn" is what this fourth book amounts to. I'll read the fifth, but not because I want to. I'll read it only because of the time I've put in to getting this far.
”
zdislaw wrote this review Wednesday, January 7 2009.
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