Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Don't get me wrong. I loved books one, two and three. LOVED them. After reading book four, I had a strong feeling that Martin was going off the deep end. Chapter after chapter of crap I didn't care about, hundreds of pages of back story download, useless information, useless characters, gobs of side stores and adventures only to finally culminate in disaster for EVERYONE I DID care about. Still I had hope. I thought ... this HAS to get better. So on to book five. The first quarter of the book is a trial. Again, hundreds of pages of back story blather, much of it about characters that were minor in the first books, but suddenly are the central figures in the series ... for no apparent reason. Theon Greyjoy? Really? Why? Suddenly, some old knight that got retired in book one gets page after page of point of view, a new princeling gets his own storyline. Meanwhile, the characters you really want to know about are forgotten, pushed to the wayside, no longer worthy of a page or two when their stories are what made you struggle through all that back story to get to in the first place. STILL, I had hope. So I plowed through the rest of book six, only to be totally and completely furious with what he does in every single storyline. It's almost as if Martin wanted to lose the fantastic readership he had in the beginning. What was he thinking? When you start off a series with a handful of characters the readers love, then KILL EVERY SINGLE ONE, you've got to at some point say, enough is enough. Did any of his editors try to reign him in?? Did anyone say .... you know, do we HAVE to kill off this guy? We all really like him. Or, can't we get a little more of THIS person's story? Her character is interesting and the story is great ... does she HAVE to go through this bloody hell you've designed for her? It would be one thing if he replaced the characters we LOVED with MORE characters we love ... but no. Most are simpering, directionless, two dimensional nuisances, that take the place of fully fleshed out personalities like Eddard Stark, Rob Stark, Brianne the Maid of Tarth... not to mention Jon Snow...Oh, we get a lot of Jon Snow in book five. But take one guess what happens to him! I want them back. I want them all back, because the dregs we are left with offer nothing of appeal for me. It seems in Martin's world, all the good guys die. Everything bad you can expect to happen, will. Evil rules the land. We're left with a place no decent person would want to be. If I have the ability to leave a world that seems fraught with nothing but senseless killing, rape, murder, disease, I think I will choose to leave it. Which is why I won't be scrambling to read book six if there is one. It's time to get out of this world...before I get myself killed, like everyone else does.