Heard about this series of books for quite a while, but it has been my habit of not starting any series that has yet to be completed, in fear of it never will. (Took me about 12 years to finish 5 Star Stories, and let's not get started with the Wheel of Time)
However, due to the fact that I've started A Game of Thrones LCG (which is the name of the first book in this series), out of curiosity, I started on A Game of Thrones book. After I've started, I raced through all 4 books in no time, greedily going one after the other without rest. I swear I've lost 5 years of unlife just because of this, but I think it's pretty worth it.
The series of book is well written, I must say, perhaps among the most well written books that I have had the privilege to be exposed to. I have many good things to say about this series, but I'll start with the bad ones.
For a start, it's not finished. And anything that's not finished, in the high-risk world nowadays, always have a chance of never finishing. With a good story like this, and cliff-hangers (sorta), this is absolute torture. Secondly, the characters, whom are mostly well written, and many I kinda got to like, dropped like flies. They're like Imperial Guardsmen without even their basic armor vest, and they're fighting Genestealers in close combat, being charged. With characters dying like this, one can easily get into mild depression after a while. Lastly, at least to me, the books' story lines are diverse and wide, and jumping all around the place, ALL THE TIME. This is difficult for me as I need to readjust pretty much after every 3 chapters. Just when I was getting worried about Arya being caught by the Lannisters, I was then thrown into political intrigue with Tyrion back in King's Landing - this issue, at least to me, causes immediate flipping of pages at best, and complete denial at worse, usually leading to missing a couple of chapters just to find out what's happening to some of the better liked (or cliffhanging situations) characters. (Ya, then they DIE). Imagine my despair after reading a couple of hours.
That said, you guys will probably notice that if the book is not good, all the previous issues would be non-issues.
Yes, this book, as far as I'm concerned, is great. It's full of intrigue, excitement, drama, and some very nice plot lines and IMHO, very well written characters with flesh and blood.
The story started with the royal family of House Stark, one of the great houses in the continent of Westeros. (think Crab Clan, White Scars, Norse (who are cultured)). The finding of the 6 wolf cubs given to the 6 children of the royal House Stark family. The story then follows the death of the King and the war for the throne that followed. I'm not going to give out any hints of what's going on, anyone interested to skip the book and know the stuff can wiki it, but I think that the story deserves reading.
G1 told me that the first few chapters are not that exciting, though I tend to disagree. The finding of the cubs, visit of King Robert, Bran's problem, Jon's issues - all added up very well into a great introduction, lasting almost half the book all the way to the incident in King's Landing, resulting in the war of the five kings. After that, the story really got exciting, with full scale wars, little squad sized skirmishes (with heroic characters), mystery, drama, romance (like with Dany and Khal Drogos, and the birth of the Dragons) and many many hours of beautiful story telling.
The book is written in the form of perspective of different characters, with the chapter's story told from the viewpoint of one of them - so you'd have a chapter named, say "Arya", and it would be the events happening to, or around her, and the next one would be named, say "Catelyn", who would then be talking about what's going on half a continent away to her mother. What's with Arya would be her flight from King's Landing back to Winterfell, filled with one-to-one combat, stealth, hiding etc, while Catelyn would be dealing with politics, intrigues and power struggle generally involved with a war that was going on between her son Robb and the Lannisters. Two completely different themes, and 2 very different scale of things. But all woven into a great background.
Many of the rich histories and legends were interwoven into different chapters, told by different people, at different times, for different reasons. Without digging into the RPG books, one might have a hard time piecing together what went on before "current events", though I expect all to eventually catch up by book 2 as they're mentioned quite often, or at least referred to often enough to drill it into your brain. That said, that wouldn't hurt the enjoyment of the reading at all.
The different chapter format does make it easy to put down the book when one needs to do something else besides reading (generally involves keeping oneself alive), and picking it up again is easy, as the chapter are generally well written, and the story unfolding interestingly enough to keep you glued to the book(s) for rather a while.
I strongly recommend this book, for those who are going to watch the HBO series, read the book, for those who wants to play the A Game of Thrones LCG, read the book, and for those who've been playing, or will be playing all the Game of Thrones games - board game, war game etc. pick up the book, I'm pretty sure that you will not be disappointed - until you reach the last book in print, and has to wait almost forever for the next instalment.
(o.o)
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