It's taken many years for George R.R. Martin to finally release the fifth installment in his A Song of Fire and Ice series, which is currently the source material for the hit HBO show Game of Thrones, but everyone is saying its worth the wait.
A Dance with Dragons went on sale today and a lot of the reviews around the internet are very complimentary. Many of them say that fans who were disappointed with the fourth book will have their faith redeemed with A Dance With Dragons.
Here's a sampling of quotes, with links to the full reviews (those of you who have not read the books and only watched the show will find some spoilers from future plotlines in the full reviews, but we've taken care not to include them below):
LA Times: Was 'A Dance With Dragons' worth the six-year wait?
Absolutely. Indeed, Martin's decision to release a sizable chunk of his story-in-progress as the fourth installment — the underrated 'A Feast for Crows' (2005) — now seems wise and actually generous to readers....Having overcome the writerly challenges of a series grown longer than expected — and having survived the well-documented hostility of those readers who have displayed a grotesque sense of entitlement over publication delays — Martin seems poised in the last two books to bring home one of the best series in the history of fantasy.
Washington Post: 'A Dance With Dragons,' all 1,000 pages of it, is now in bookstores, nearly six years after its predecessor. And it was worth the wait....Filled with vividly rendered set pieces, unexpected turnings, assorted cliffhangers and moments of appalling cruelty, 'A Dance With Dragons' is epic fantasy as it should be written: passionate, compelling, convincingly detailed and thoroughly imagined.... The result is a complex summer blockbuster with brains and heart, a book with rare — and potentially enormous — appeal.
Publisher's Weekly: More characters are revived than killed off and more peace accords signed than wars declared, but the heart-hammering conclusion hints that the next installment will see a return to the fiery battles and icy terror that earned the series its fanatic following. Even ostensibly disillusioned fans will be caught up in the interweaving stories.
Time: I believed Martin was our age's and our country's answer to the master of epic fantasy. Now it's six years later, and I've read Martin's new novel,
A Dance with Dragons, and I'm happy to report that I was totally right. Martin has produced — is producing, since the series isn't over — the great fantasy epic of our era....I don't know when I have ever been as comprehensively and pleasurably outgeneraled as I am when I read Martin. He raises and raises the stakes, long past when any other writer would have walked away from the table, and just when you think he's done, he goes all in.
Salon: I couldn't stop reading Martin because my desire to know what was
going to happen combined with my absolute inability to guess what
would happen and left me helpless before his sorcery. At the end, I felt shaken and exhausted. I can't recall the last time a work of science fiction or fantasy had that kind of effect on me. I'm almost glad that it will be years before I have to do this all over again. Because it will take me years to recover.
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