Finished reading George R. R. Martin’s Dance with Dragons over the weekend. Wow. What an amazing pile of nothing. How many hundreds of pages? Seriously, I don’t know – I read it on a Kindle and those things for some unknown reason don’t use page numbers (stupidest idea ever if you ask me). Anyway, hundreds of pages and almost nothing happens. I think Martin squeezed out this stinker just so he could sell an extra book. The choice to split these last two books by character/location instead of just writing them all chronologically was a colossal failure, in my opinion. Since there was so much nothing going on in this book, I can barely remember what happened in the previous one.
In case you haven’t read it, save the time and money. My summary below will tell you everything you need to know about what happened in this book that was semi-important (nothing actually important happened). If you can remember what happened in the previous book (I cannot) I am 100% certain that you could use this summary to pick up the next book and not miss a beat.
[spoiler alert]
Bran: Waited. In a cave. For many months.
Arya: Killed some guy.
Tyrion: Traveled a lot. Learned to joust from pig back.
Dany: Married a local noble to achieve peace in Meereen. Flew off on one of her dragons.
Jon: Let the Wildlings through the Wall. Stabbed in the back (literally).
Theon: Broken by torture. Escapes with the fake Arya.
Stannis: Marched on Winterfell (held by the Boltons). Terrible storm decimated his army.
Cersei: Released from imprisonment, awaiting trial.
Miscellaneous notables:
• A prince of Dorne arrives too late to woo Dany and attempts to tame her dragons to impress her. They kill him.
• Turns out that Aegon Targaryen (son of Rhaegar and Elia) is not dead and emerges from hiding to land on Westeros and start his conquest.
• Kevan Lannister holds a short term as regent before being killed.
[end spoilers]
Anything else was either completely pointless or unimportant to the overall story. Now you’re ready for the next book, if you still hold out hope for something interesting to happen within the next several hundred pages or feel you can stomach that many pages of tedium. Not sure I can. It’s the Wheel of Time all over again. If this series sticks to only two more books as has been purported, I might manage to finish it.
2 comments:
I largely enjoyed this one (I also re-read all the others to lead up to it). For me it's always the compelling characters he writes and undercutting what other storytellers would (predictably) do that I love about Martin. I agree that the region splitting thing in the last two books didn't work very well but it's still way better than any other fantasy I've ever read. Jordan is the only one that's come close for me and he's still in a different league.
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