Dragons, Yes, Dancing, Less So

So, I can summarize this review in one sentence:

"You go straight to hell, George R. R. Martin!"

But I can unpack that some, too:

Look, This is one of those book series I got myself pot committed to a while back and, while it escapes so many of the clichés that plague other books in this genre, it suffers from perhaps the worst one of all. To wit: It almost completely refuses to go anywhere.

I maintain steadfastly that no story ever told needs more than three books to tell. None. Not One. If you need more than three books of average length to tell your story then your problem is not that you have an epic tale to tell, it is that you don't know how to edit.

These books are so weighted down by point of view characters and plod along so slowly that it seems impossible to believe that any resolution of the narrative is forthcoming in the promised two remaining books. And, let's not forget, there was originally just going to be one more.

Ironically, what George R. R. Martin has become best known for - his cavalier willingness to kill off major characters - doesn't seem to exempt him from falling in love with every minor character introduced such that we have to follow that character all over the place while he or she dawdles through the plot. Indeed, even his character deaths are beginning to feel less like courageous genre-busting surprises and more like a rather macabre version of the "and it was all a dream" cop out. Whole story arcs that we are dragged through end so abruptly that one wonders why they were necessary to the plot. And if they weren't necessary to the plot, then why are we bogging down this already overlong story with them? Life may be like this, but stories, sir, are not. When people repeatedly run off on unrelated tangents while relating a happening, we don't call them raconteurs or mythshapers, we call them bad storytellers.

But look, that's all rather gripey and harsh and I only mean it partly anyway. In fact, I really enjoyed this book and, for all my bitching, waaaaaaaaaaay more happens in this one than in the preceding book, A Feast For Crows. Moreover, the impeccable timing of releasing this book just as the solid HBO series Game Of Thrones wrapped up for the season managed to scratch an itch I didn't know I had and I did leave the novel reinvigorated for the story itself.

That said, it does end on a couple of seriously dickish cliffhangers and deaths that seem cruel when you're dealing with an author who can take half a decade or more to finish a book.

Oh, and apparently the Daenerys storyline is just moving in circles?

You know how it is, though; if you read the other books in the series, you'll read this one too. probably, you will even like it better than one or two of the others, but I can't shake the sensation that nothing in the story has any purpose, and that dimmed my enjoyment of it significantly.