Book 35: A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

I'm back on schedule now and ready to get back into this series.  I nearly burned myself out on it when I read the first four books in one month.  At around a thousand pages each, that was a bit much.  I'm eager to read this one because the last one felt a bit like half a book.  The author, instead of showing half the story for all the characters, decided to show all the story for half the characters.  Unfortunately, the characters that I really enjoyed were, for the most part, absent from the last book.  This one should show the events surrounding those missing characters and, hopefully, advance the plot a bit further.  I know that he plans at least 2 more books in this series, so I'm not expecting a resolution, but we'll see where he goes with it.

1040 pages means about 150 pages per day, quite a lot.

REVIEW:  As I mentioned before, the previous book in this series, A Feast for Crows, followed the stories for most of the characters in the Seven Kingdoms.  This book follows the stories of the remaining characters, most of them either at The Wall or across the Narrow Sea in the Free Cities.  This was good for me because the characters that this book focused on happen to be some of my favorites.  Tyrion, Jon Snow, Daenerys and Arya were all there and it was good to catch up with them.  What look to be some momentous changes are also beginning in this book.  Jon Snow has taken charge and is putting that authority to use and Daenerys’ dragons are finally starting to show their power.  Once Martin has brought the narratives int his book up to the time of those in the previous book he starts to show us how some of them may eventually tie together.  It’s just a tease, but it’s definitely starting to look like something more than just a lot of random character plots.

Unfortunately, his writing style has not much improved.  More than anything, it seems like he just needs  a more assertive editor.  He has a tendency to use repetitive descriptive phrases such as the dreaded “useless as nipples on a breastplate.”  He also has entire chapters of questionable relevance.  It’s admirable that he’d want to flesh out his side characters and their motives but, ultimately, it doesn’t matter.  It just serves to detract from the real action.  These overelaborations and the distractions of skipping around so much between chapters drag the plot to a snail’s pace.  He reminds me of Robert Jordan, the writer of the Wheel of Time series.  Jordan would spend an entire 800-900 page book moving an army from one city to the next with the only action at the very end.  Which, of course, is another problem here. Because this is the middle of the series, there is no resolution to any of the plot-lines.  Martin's series is not like Jordan's where there is a fight with one of the "little bad guys" at the end of each book.  It is the middle of a single, very long narrative.  Like chapter 40 through 70 of some 20,000 page epic.

Overall, the book is slowpaced and meandering, though there is still a sense that, somewhere in the future, the many, many threads that Martin has woven will come together to form a whole.  I can't say that the series is my favorite of all time, but it is still in the top ten and I will continue to read the sequels when they are released, if only to see where all this is leading.

7 out of 10.