Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

With A Game of Thrones, it's the good stuff that sucks you in, but all the problems that leave you frustrated and resentful when its done. The good stuff includes writing that flows well, characterizations that that may be occasionally ripped off but are at least many and varied and usually aren't completely flat (better than most fantasy/sci-fi), an immersive world, tension amongst the characters and factions, and hints of dire developments to come. But please, this is an 800 page book that fails to completely tell even one story. George R R Martin has taken about 8 plots, none of which would amount to even a novella on its own, and put them all in a blender in the hopes that when it all comes out as sludge, you won't notice that it doesn't add up to anything. The constant switching back and forth between plot lines and perspective doesn't allow even a single one to develop in more than a halting manner. I am of the school that believes if you are going to make me read 800 pages and call it a book, and make me wait 3 years for the next one, you better be able to write one complete arc anyway, somthing that has eluded this author. Good grief, when did it become acceptable to write an 800-page book with so little actual content? Huge swaths of this book could be deleted and it would make little difference to the reading experience. As frustrating as this is, it wouldn't in and of itself amount to fatal criticism if the book didn't have other problems. I think the chief one is just that we've seen all these people before. The Catelyn/Eddard/Robb trio seems so similar in feel to the Leto/Jessica/Paul trio in Dune that they could almost be carbon-copies, minus the trappings of setting; Catelyn's lines could be Jessica's in many spots. Sansa is straight out of the pages of War and Peace. I'm sure Arya basically wrote herself. I'm not opposed to borrowing in general, but I prefer that authors make some effort to disguise their efforts in this matter. Strip out all this, though, and you are left with some good stuff. Except in the more vulgar passages, which usually seem simply ostentatious, Martin clearly has a grasp of language. His descent into detail is occasionally tiresome, but often does do a good job at conveying a time and place, and the trade-off is well worth it. While the crush of different characters with hard-to-remember names can make War and Peace look like a one-man play, it does lend the novel a sense of grandeur and scope that is unique and welcome. And the building up of subtle tensions (like the ominous rumblings from beyond Hadrian's, er, The Wall) are well-handled, or would have been if they had ever amounted to anything. Still, at the end of the day, three books came to mind when reading this: a) Tolstoy's War and Peace; b) Stephen R Donaldson's Mirror of her Dreams; and c) Donaldson's Gap series, starting with The Real Story. A Game of Thrones is but a pale shadow of any of these books. Tolstoy has a very similar soap-opera-esque feel, but he is a master crafstmen who had a story to tell, who told it, and finished it. Martin appears to be none of these things, but of course War and Peace is a classic of western literature. Donaldson's Mirror of her Dreams features an incredibly similar medeval-esque setting of political intruige, but Donaldson's story had great imagination, vastly superior characters, and a plot that had an arc and momentun. Donaldon's Gap series had a similar format (character-switching chapters), similarly traumatized characters and a similar willingness to kill off anyone, and similar layers and layers of intruige - but it again had vastly richer and far more believable characters, managed to make even the nasty ones sympathetic at some level, and had a plot which actually moved and allowed the characters to develop in interesting ways and stuff to happen. In short, A Game of Thrones seems amaturish and derivitive by comparison to any of these books. A book can be of less-than-epic quality and still do OK, but when it comes to A Game of Thrones, I keep coming back to one fact - 800 pages, and it's little more than an introduction to Westros. If I were an author writing an 800-page book, I'd want more to show for it.