Game of Thrones Book Review

After having a box set of the first four books in the Song of Ice and Fire series for a few months I finally picked up Game of Thrones. I have mixed emotions about this book. I enjoyed reading it and at the same time I didn’t really love it. I think that I thought that it would be more exciting then it turned out to be, not to say that it was interesting, it was just very different.

First off I want to say that I really like George R.R. Martin’s writing style, he is very clear, concise, and I never once was confused as to what was happening. Each chapter is told by a different character and I like that you get to see so many different points of view. I think that one of the best parts of Game of Thrones is by far the world building. The characters tend to be in different parts of the world and this really helps to create scope and make the reader realise just how big this world is. Even when the characters are in the place you get different perspectives of what a place is actually like and it interesting to see what different people notice about a certain location.  I really love how this world, which by the way is called Westeros, feels so real while you are reading the book, and I can’t say that I have read anything that has world building of this scale.

I found the characters to be very interesting in Game of Thrones. While for me I felt there was a clear good guy versus bad guy in this book I could also see where a reader could see it a differently from me. Each character has both strong good and bad qualities and displayed both good and bad judgment throughout the story. I really like the notion that all the characters can have both sides of the coin and it makes for interesting character development.

The story really caught my attention when I first started to read Game of Thrones, but it never really picked up later in the book and instead stayed at the same pace of the remainder of the book. This makes the story feel more like a history instead of fantasy or adventure for me. I think that it is an interesting idea to have a fiction novel that reads like a history because it helps with the world building and makes it feel more realistic. However, it did make this already very long book feel like it was longer then it really was.