A Dance of Dragons

The Book in 1 Sentence

A completely pointless and tragically long book that provides 5 scenes that matter and 10,000 that don't.

Brief Review

This book has to be the longest book that serves no purpose other than to be long. Characters are introduced that die, others are given a more prominent story section than in previous books, but play no big part. 900/1000 pages of nothing.

Why I Read this book

At this point I am just trying to finish the series. Thankfully this is the last book till the new ones come out.

In-Depth Review (Favorite Quotes)

I really hated this book feeling that it was there to waste my time. There is at least 2 characters that are introduced into the book that die, and you spend chapters with them. There is a lot of drama and politics of people sitting around or going in circles, sometimes quite literally, and nothing changes.

I should digress a bit, as things obviously change. However, it is such small items that Martin could have taken out 75% of this book, and it would have been in the same place. I get what the attempt was to do, but we have spent 4 books falling in love with characters like Sansa, Arya, Jon, Tyrion, and Daenerys, just for half the book to follow new characters that don't add much to the over all story.

Ok, enough bashing this long book. There are some awesome scenes in here that are really well told. Any scene with the dragons doing dragon things, the fighting with the gray men, and finally any scene with Tyrion. He is such an amazing character and I think he is the ONLY character that grows in this book. For the most part. One of the characters has some decent growth at the end of the book, but I don't want to say who.

Rating

Usually when I am running, I look forward to my books. This one started at 50 hours and I knew it was going to be a slog, but I didn't realize how much of one it would be. I just wanted to finish this book to move on and now that I have caught up to everyone who read the book before the show finished, I have no idea why they were upset. I need to ask my old boss to sit in on a podcast or something because he was furious at the end of the show. There are a lot of things that have been intermittent throughout the books that I am not sure how they will play out in the books that is different from the show. The amount of unanswered questions that are implied, but not proven by the end of the book is immense. I think this book could have been 300 pages and told the same story. This is a 5 and if I didn't think the books would pay off, I would quit reading the series.

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