divine angst

A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin

This is the third book in the series A Song of Fire and Ice. I like these books—the story is interesting, complex, grand—but these books also frustrate me.

Most of my frustration is due to the architecture of the novel. Each chapter tells a part of the story from the perspective of a different character. When the plot is moving quickly and characters are converging, this is a very Good Thing. But when characters are far away, only moving toward a destination or an event, this is annoying. No chapter is long enough to satisfy me, and when it ends, I’m left wanting more of THAT character and not the character forthcoming.

Swords was pretty slow, then, for me, for the first half or so. There’s a lot of traveling going on, a lot of political intrigue without much action. Only in the second half of the book do the storylines start to really come together as characters and plotlines converge. The second half was a fast read for me, and I breezed through it in the Orlando airport and on the two planes we took.

I will recommend this book—or, perhaps I should just recommend the series. Martin has really created something terrific. I just wish his chapters were a little longer, or he tinkered a bit with their order, so the slow parts would flow more readily.