Martin - A Dance with Dragons review

After many long years, George R.R. Martin has finished A Dance With Dragons. It is the fifth volume in the epic Song of Ice and Fire series. It's not a bad book, but not especially good either. You see, the series opened with three absolutely fantastic books. Volume four, A Feast for Crows, was a bit of a letdown and felt like it was half filler. Also, it left out some of everyone's favorite characters - Jon Snow, Tyrion Lannister, and Daenerys Targaryen. Volume five picks up their stories from the end of volume three, so everyone is very excited.

Unfortunately, half of A Dance with Dragons feels like filler. The parts that are good - pretty much everything taking place in the North of Westeros, mostly featuring Jon Snow - are very good. The rest was pretty much a mess. The stuff featuring Tyrion was interesting. He's in a pretty rough mental state after killing his former lover and his father and escaping Westeros. But virtually nothing in those chapters helps advance the overall plot of A Song of Ice and Fire. And then we have the big disappointment of Daenerys' story arc. It was just painful to read at times.

A Dance with Dragons suffers from the same ailment as other books written from the point of view of characters. It takes the "show, don't tell" maxim to the extreme. This book introduces too many PoV characters that would be better left as second-hand tellings.

The other big problem with this book is that if finishes with around 37 cliffhangers. Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit, but it creates far too many loose ends for a series that supposed to be wrapping up in two more books. (I suspect there will be at least three more before it's over.)

So, I'll give this volume a 3 on the strength of the storyline in the North. Otherwise, it would have been lower.


/ [Viking]

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