A Game of Thrones - George R.R. Martin

Title: A Game of Thrones
Author: George R.R. Martin
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: 2.5/5
# pages: 674
Date read: May, 2009

Long ago, in a land where summers can last decades and winters a lifetime, trouble is brewing. Here an enigmatic band of warriors bear swords of no human metal; a tribe of fierce wildlings carry men off into madness; a cruel young dragon prince barters his sister to win back his throne; and a determined woman undertakes the most treacherous of journeys. Amid plots and counterplots, tragedy and betrayal, victory and terror, the fate of the Starks, their allies, and their enemies hangs perilously in the balance, as each endeavors to win that deadliest of conflicts: the game of thrones.

I'm not sure whether this deserves 2 or 3 stars... wish half-star ratings had been implemented. It's not exactly boring, but very slow-moving. It doesn't usually take me a couple of weeks to read a book of this size, but I found it much too easy to put it down and was never totally engrossed in it.

I think part of this may have been that it was so dark and bleak from the very first page. The main characters were heading towards a miserable future, and it made me hesitant to like any of them, because I didn't want to feel too badly when things went wrong.

Of course I couldn't stop myself from liking the sympathetic characters regardless, so it frustrated me that those were a) the ones that were given the least page time and b) the ones whose future was left wide open for exploration in the next books. I've always been of the opinion that even books in a series should be able to stand somewhat on their own. Of course threads can and should be left open to be explored in future books, but it always annoys me when the thread I'm most interested in is left unfinished, making me feel "forced" to read the next book.

I don't know that I will... I'm very interested in knowing what happens to Daenery Targaryen, and desperately want to know whether or not Arya returns safely to her family, but are those two issues enough to make me want to wade through another 6-700 pages without even knowing for sure that they'll be resolved in that book? That I don't know.

So on the whole, unfortunately quite a big disappointment. I had great hopes for it, because it came highly recommended, but unfortunately it couldn't live up to it, and won't be a series I'll be rushing to follow.

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