Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I cannot contest the power and strength of the writing in "A Game of Thrones". Had the book been less well-written it would never have provoked the depth of dislike I feel for it. However, far from being swept into the story, I found myself continually putting it down or skipping pages. The problem for me lies in the wealth of unlikeable characers. I quite honestly couldn't find a single character I wanted to know more about. I started each chapter, grateful that I was going to read about someone different, hopefully somebody I would care about. Unfortunately I never did end up caring. It was not the moral "greyness" of the characters which bothered me; many of my favourite fictional creations have both good and evil in their makeup. It was more that I could find no reason to like the characters nor any way to identify with them, and as a result found myself alternately bored and depressed as I read. The world Martin creates, however expertly, is a dark, gritty and cynical place. Hope, innocence, kindness, and even sorrow do not survive in it. And that, for me, removes the very qualities that make a fantasy novel a joy to read and set it apart from other kinds of fictions.