The latest installment in the series, and in the interest of avoiding spoilers and redundancy, I'll not summarize or talk about the plot lines. But there is something about this book that irks me, although the irritation it inspires is different in kind than the one produced by its immediate precursor, A Feast for Crows, which was an overlong and overwrought chapter in the larger story. A Dance With Dragons is in fact of equivalent quality to the second book in the series, A Clash of Kings, but it does not rise up to the excellence of the first and third books, A Game of Thrones and A Storm of Swords, respectively. And yet they all share the same fatal flaw, which, in the end might not be a flaw at all; namely, there is no end. It seems silly to view the series as a whole in critical terms until it's complete, and so you're left with mindless wondering about how the story will eventually unfold.
Although I can't help mindlessly speculate that the theme of the books will eventually be: Blood tells. Which is abhorrent, yet par for the course in the epic high fantasy genre, although I had hoped that Martin was trying to undermine this tired trope.
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