The long waited installment of perhaps the best fantasy series there is or have ever been.
The story continues partly in parallel with the earlier book and deals with those characters who were not featured in it.
As usually, the story is seen from multiple viewpoints, perhaps from too many. For some reason there seemed to be a fair amount of fluctuation of quality between different chapters. Some of them (especially the most Reek/Theon chapters,) were extremely good, some less good, or seemed even superfluous.
As a whole, this book felt more than a little like a middle part of a series: the pieces are being set up for the more important events in the later books and the Real Events will happen sometime later. Well, there were some moving and surprising turns of the plot, but even they seemed to be more cliffhangers for the rest of the series and the consequences were not explored at all, and practically all characters were left to hang on cliffhangers. This was not the best book on the series, and it seems that GRRM has reached that point in his career that he doesn’t have to use an editor anymore. There are a fair amount of things which could have been condensed and even removed resulting in a more satisfying and entertaining book, not to say that this wasn’t one.
1040 pp.
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