Spoiler Alert
Spoiler Alert
Spoiler Alert
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We start this book with a prologue in Oldtown, home of the Citadel where the maesters forge their chains. We hear a bit about dragons and meet some novices and of course somebody dies. Moving on. The iron islands are up next and here is what is going on there. Balon Greyjoy has died leaving no male heirs. His daughter Asha wants the crown, but she is female so has very little support. According to law the iron crown should go to Balon's next brother, the man they call Euron Crow's Eye. The priest of the Drowned God Aeron Damphair thinks that it should be the next brother Victarion, who keeps to the old ways. Aeron decrees that a kingsmoot is what will determine the next king of the iron islands, trusting that his Drowned God will crown Victarion. Euron Crow's Eys ends up with the crown and promptly starts raiding and pillaging all the surrounding lands, amassing an enormous fleet and becoming extremely formidable on the sea. Brienne, the lady knight of Tarth is off with the sword "Oathkeeper" which Jamie gave her to go find Sansa Stark and take her someplace safe. This would fulfill both Brienne's and Jaime's vow to find her and keep her safe. Along the way Brienne runs into Podrick Payne, the Imps faithful squire and he comes along on the quest. She also acquires another companion in the form of a knight by the name of Ser Hyle Hunt, not that she is all that thrilled with his company. They continue their search for Sansa. By the end of the book all three of them are in the process of being hung by the zombie Catelyn Stark...oh did I forget to mention that? Yep we get a whole 3 pages where we finally figure out that Mamma Stark has been brought back by as a zombie, why? I have no idea, this book isn't big on answers. Speaking of our dear Sansa, she is now known as Alayne Stone, the bastard daughter of .jpg)
Peter Baylish, who will as you remember in the last book, pushed his wife the Lady Lysa off a mountain and assumed the protectorate of her lands. Little sickly Lord Robert Arryn, has taken to Alayne and will only follow her directions. When we leave them, Peter has made plans to marry Sansa off to the heir to the Vale and tells her they will reveal her true name at the wedding, uniting two great northern powers. Sansa's sister Arya Stark has made her way to the city of Braavos, to join the temple of the god of many faces. Here Arya becomes Cat, a girl who sells clams and mussels on the docks and continually tries to become "nobody". She is set the task of learning to control her face, and her words. She only succeeds so far and when we leave her she has awoken blind. Samwell Tarly is sent to Oldtown with maester Aemon, Gilly and her baby, and a singer who ends up dead at the hands of Arya Stark (which is probably why she ends up blind.) Maester Aemon dies on the voyage, Sam finally gets it on with Gilly, who he discovers is not escaping with her own child, but rather the son of Mance Rayder. Jon Snow sent the child away to try and protect him from Melisandre, who wanted to burn him for on of her rituals. Sam ends up at the Citidel to become a maester himself. Back in King's Landing, Cersei is desperatly trying to keep control of the kingdom. Margaery Tyrell has married the young boy king Tommen and is trying to use her influence to become the head honcho queen. Cersei is of course having none of it and does her best to plot and scheme the little queens downfall. Cersei authorizes the rebanding of the Poor Fellows, essentially religious holy warriors, which puts her in the new High Septons good graces. Cersei manipulates various cronies and eventually finds a way to get Margaery accused of treason, fornication and adultery, which is punishable by death. Unfortunate her plans go awry and she finds herself thrown in a cell, accused of the same things. Jaime is off trying to set the country back to rights, including taking Riverrun without shedding any Stark or Tulley blood as he had promised Catlyn Stark when she freed him in the last book. He is fairly successful at his task. He is also secretly learning to use his left hand as his sword hand, hoping to regain some of his former skill. Across the sands we see the country of Dorne and witness the princess Arianne attempt to crown the Princes Myrcella queen of the Seven Kingdoms. She is found out and captured by her own father the Prince Doran, who is a more cautious man. He has also had to imprison the daughters of his brother Oberyn who are intent on starting a war and avenging their fathers death. We get a few other little vignettes from people we have never heard of before, half of which are dead by the end of their chapters. All in all this is about all that happened.
A lot of people loved A Storm of Swords and did not find this book up to par. I must confess I have to agree with most reviewers, especially in comparison this book just did not hold up at all. After so much happening in the last three books, this one felt incredibly slow. In fact most of these stories could have been told in one or two chapters. I thought Brienne's chapters were especially overly long, and that she had many more chapters then she needed to get to where she was going. I appreciated that the author was trying to give us some different perspectives, but sprinkling them into the main characters would have worked better for me. One of the things I missed the most in this book was a sense of caring where the characters were concerned. As a reader, in the previous books I had a vested interest in most of the characters, even the evil characters usually had their sympathetic moments. In this book, eh I really did not care what happened to anybody. By completely cutting out ALL of my favorite characters I found myself wondering what they were up to instead of paying attention to the story at hand. This book wasn't all bad, and if I didn't have the last three books to compare it to, I may have enjoyed it even more. I liked most of Cersei's chapters, watching her get more and more desperate was fitting, again it was drawn out longer then I cared, but at least it was a continuation of the previous books. What I did really enjoy was Arya's chapters and getting to visit Braavos. I loved the idea of the Many Faced god, and her conflicting desires make Arya a great character. Also the Venice like qualities that Braavos has makes me happy. I liked seeing Dorne as well, it was nice to finally have an idea of all seven kingdoms. I also just finished watching Season 2 of the TV version of this show, which corresponds to the second book Clash of Kings (which was awesome!) and it makes me excited for the next season, but it makes me wonder how they will film this book with all of it's main characters missing. Overall I feel this book could have easily been edited down to about 10 or less chapters that could have been incorporated with another book. I give it eh 5 out of 10 ruby covered swords.
What did you think of this book? Were you disappointed or did you find more in it than I did? Have you been watching the TV show? Why is the author so obsessed with clothes and flags?
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