Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

(SPOILER ALERT, there be SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW! YOU ARE WARNED!) First, the good stuff: Martin continues to have excellent prose. No one denies his talent in writing scenery, characters, location, atmosphere, etc. His command of the English language is impressive, and the book is very well written from that standpoint. That said, there's far more to a good book than just pretty language. - Jon Snow: perhaps the most engaging of the POVs as we see what is basically the main protagonist of ASOIAF come into his own as a leader of men. We see him making hard decisions to prepare the NW for the inevitable assault of the Others whilst juggling the politics of the kingdom. This is all well and good. Then we get to his last chapter, and Jon's character makes a completely inexplicable decision that shatters the suspension of disbelief in the novel. Having previously chosen to stay with the NW on multiple occasions in the past (when his brother went to war, his father died, Stannis offering to legitimize him) when he was but a member of the NW, he decides to break his oath and go South based solely on the letter of a known madman and effectively abandoning his post of Lord Commander of the NW before they face their greatest threat in millennia and while they squabble internally with the Wildlings. This comes across as not a decision that the character made, but rather something the author needed to happen and therefore happens. Following this, we're treated with a completely emotionless and unbelievable character death when any reader worth his salt knows full well the character will return somehow in the subsequent books. -Dany: The long path Dany had taken in the first three books from frightened young girl to bad-*ss warrior queen has been completely shattered. The Dany we see in ADWD is a completely different character, one that this reader had an incredibly hard time taking seriously. The "plot" of the book , to the extent it had one, comes to a screeching halt every time the narrative went back to Mereen. I don't quite understand what was going through Martin's mind but he effectively killed any interest we as readers could possibly have in her story. Perhaps he was hoping to cater towards the Twilight fandom in his descriptions of Dany's teenage crush on Daario, but anyone over the age of fifteen can't help but feel the strong urge to skip her chapters in this book. - Cliffhangers: Martin has gotten into the horrible habit of using artificial cliffhangers to keep the reader's interest. I've lost count of how many characters have "died" at a chapters end only to pop up later, to say nothing of resurrected characters. This takes away any dramatic impact any death might have as we the reader simply don't believe them. Catelyn, Brienne, Tyrion, Asha, Theon, Rickon, Bran, and now Jon Snow have all suffered "deaths" as it were, only to come back. This is getting preposterous. I could go on and on. The lack of plot development. The abrupt transitions in the overall narrative. The unforgivable single throwaway Jaime chapter. On and on, we are given clear signs that Martin has no idea what he's doing with the story and is morphing into Robert Jordan (albeit with better writing) before our very eyes. The excitement we felt in reading the first three books is long gone. First AFFC dampened it tremendously, but that could have been dismissed as a mistep. No longer. It pains me as ASOIAF was one of my favorite fantasy series... but now I fear it has become poor fan-fiction.