Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I will not contest that the writing is excellent, it is. I will not tell you that I didnt spend many nights unable or unwilling to put the book down way past a sane hour for sleep, I did. And yet, when I finished this book, I felt the fool for having wasted so much time with it. I think it comes down to what you want from your fantasy. I want characters I can love and believe in and who I know will somehow, no matter how grievious hard their path may be, manage to survive and make things right. Martin doesnt care about characters here. He cares about plot, and the realistic, organic, authentic world he believes he is creating--which smacks of arrogance to me. He creates characters that you can esteem, but he has no especial regard for them. And while his plot may entertain us, because he has no love for the people who occupy his world, he cannot hope to satisfy us. Martin's book/world is not a decent, honorable place, nor is it a place where decent honorable people can hope to survive. Time after time he seemed most interested in proving Dark Helmet's (from "Space Balls") hypothesis that Evil will always defeat Good, because Good is dumb. Unfortunately for me that kind of world doesnt fulfill my requirements of a fantasy. I am not asking for Pollyanna, but I expect, wholeheartedly and unquestioningly, that fantasy literature will be Comedy as defined by Aristotle--meaning that at the end the good guys win, and not tragedy where they do not. This book, I suppose, in the end, is a tragedy, and although I have often wept for "friends" I have "lost" in fantasy novels, I stayed the course (in those books) because I believed that their sacrifice would pay off. I do not have that hope here. Martin's writing is excellent, and the plot fascinating, but what is a fantasy without people you can root for and love? Martin has created compelling characters here, but he never breathed the breath of love into them, and so, if he, as their creator cant love them, at the end of the book I am left with the question, why should we?