I haven’t started the reread yet(I’m working through some old Ed McBain novels that I just came across instead.), but I think you’re wrong. Jon is convinced that whatever young lady is running around down by Winterfell is Arya. Don’t we know that Stannis’ camp has Theon and Jeyne? We can’t trust Bolton in anything, and Stannis was not ready to attack Winterfell. Whatever victory Ramsay may (or may not) have won was not against Stannis, but against the smaller forces around Winterfell.
Ramsay tells Jon to give his wife back. If Ramsay was in possession of “Arya” why would he ask for her back. So if Jon is going after “Arya”, why would he go to Ramsay, where he knows she isn’t?
Yes, Theon and Jeyne were with Stannis the last time we saw them.
While I would hope that Martin can take well meant criticism to heart, I fear that it means he will take 12 years on the next book instead of 6.
Ramsay knows that his wife is not Arya; Jon doesn’t. Ramsay doesn’t know that Jon doesn’t have his wife; Jon does. Ramsay thinks his wife is at the Wall; Jon knows where Arya is. She’s in the area around Winterfell and east, west, south and north somewhat.
Ramsay thinks she’s at the Wall. That’s something like 700 miles away. So “Arya” had time to travel ~700 miles by the time Jon sets off. She’ll have had more time to travel by the time he gets to Winterfell. So she can, in theory, be anywhere within a ~1000 mile radius from Winterfell by the time Jon gets there and she’s going to stick near the craziest fuck that ever crazied? It makes no sense for Jon to go to Winterfell if he’s going after Arya.
Sounds to me like he was going to take out a threat to the Wall.
I wish that I had phrased this half as well as the Amazon reviewer did:
Well, I think that’s nonsense, he’s after Arya, but I shall no longer argue it for now. Look for me after the reread, which should start Saturday.
The worst crime a writer can commit is to be boring. I am in page 900, the characters have travelled thousand of miles and the plot has advanced 3 inches.
George Martin is a hack and his editor should be prosecuted. I gave the book 1 star in Amazon and I wish that the negative reviews help Martin to find his way and FINISH the damm story.
I’ll buy the next book, eventhough I can’t find the strenght to finish this one.
Westeros is probably 60/40 that Aegon is fake. Dany has a vision about a mummer’s dragon=fake dragon=fake targ=Young Griff is an impostor. Also, Aegon would be older than Dany. Dany should be 16-17 by now and Tyrion thinks Young Griff is 15ish.
Illyrio’s wife is talked about a bit. She had Targaryen coloring. Perhaps Young Griff is his son. The fact that he’s risking so much in trying to overthrow the Westerosi powers that be without much apparent gain is less mysterious if Young Griff is his son. He’d be father to a king.
This series had me by the balls. Even though I wasn’t a fan of the book, I love the speculation.
The one that bugged me was “He was not wrong.” I bet that phrase was used 20 times.
I finished the book last night. I enjoyed it well enough, but I agree with most of what’s been said here about not making forward progress, and the frustration of a new long-lost Targaryen, and too many people being killed, only not really.
Question: Tyrion and Penny were sold as “Lot 97”. Who was it, early in the book, who had a dream/vision about “Lot 97”? Was it Bran? I need to get these books on my Kindle so I can search them.
I largely agree that it was disappointing. I almost put it down after 150 pages and just read the plot summaries on the internet.
For me, the biggest problem is that GRRM has drifted away from what he is best at. So much of the volume of the novel is spent outside Westeros, the country he has spent the last four thousand pages building up. The Wall is liminal and mostly disconnected from Westerosi politics, and Free Cities/Valyria/whatever crap is just a colorless calque of Hyboria. We need more screen time for the Boltons, Manderlys, and Freys. Fewer slaves, eunuchs, and other orientalizing grotesqueries. Events outside Westeros really should be used as a palette cleanser, emphatically not the main event. Daenerys was never a particularly interesting character, so she really does not have the depth to bear the kind of focus GRRM is placing on her now. Less Daenerys, more Blackfish please. The Davos chapters reminded me why I read these books in the first place.
The only part of the book that really held together were North plotlines. They were more in keeping with what made SoS such a great book in the first place.
Pretty disappointed so far. But to be fair, I’ve never had such high hopes for a book before.
I’m about a quarter through, and if I hadn’t read the other four, I’d stop reading it. In fact, after waiting impatiently to get it, I DID stop reading it long enough to finish the Alan Lewrie series that I had started just to have something to read while I was waiting for ADWD to ship. I found the Lewrie books much more enjoyable.
The thing I didn’t like about the first four books was that so many of the characters were on long journeys, but at least they had adventures on the way. So far in ADWD, it’s almost all long journeys without the adventures. Tyrion’s chapters used to be the best; now they’re the most boring.
But I DID read the first four books, and there ARE some good bits in what I’ve read so far, so I’ll soldier on, and hope it gets better.
At least three or four times in the first hundred pages, there was a character who pissed and then “shook off the last drops.” Is that such an interesting phrase that it had to be repeated so much?
Overall, I enjoyed the book as I was reading it. Sure, the pace was slow, but it was building up to what had to be a terrific climax. All the pieces were moving into place in Meereen, and old wounds were about to be reopened. We even got to move past the events of Feast and get those characters into the mix. And then…the book abruptly ended.
I cannot understand the thought behind not including the trial of Cersei, the battle of Winterfell, the meeting of Dany and Tyrion, and so on. The last 2000 pages have led up to them. It’s like an entire armory of Chekov’s Guns were just dumped in the sea unfired.
I could even forgive the whole meandering not-really-moving-forward nature of these two books IF the editing was more selective. FFC and DWD could be cut down and combined into one volume without affecting the plot at all. I’d love to see an “editor’s cut” like that.
Melisandre dreams of “Melony” being sold as part of a lot, but I think that was Lot 7 (or 9, maybe).
From the example of the other fire priest, I assumed that meant Melisandre used to be a slave, and was either Melony herself or was close to Melony. Or, it may be another of her prophetic visions.
That’s what I was thinking of, thanks.
Yes, I also believe that Young Griff is actually Illyrio’s son. In addition to his wife being described with Targaryen coloring, there are a couple of other clues: a) Tyrion wears a male child’s clothing in Illyrio’s house, b) Illyrio seems desperate to see Young Griff, c) Illyrio leaves downcast when he is unable to see the boy, d) Quaithe refers to a “mummer’s dragon” aka a fake dragon, e) Varys talks about Aegon being trained to be the perfect ruler- this seems to fit in with his philosophy of doing anything to achieve peace for the realm. He has created a perfect ruler rather than waiting for one to be born.
I must believe that this is the case because if the boy is really Aegon and GRRM just pulled him out of his ass after all this time…GROAN!
Okay, a question now: what happened to the missing Freys? Some of the Amazon reviews make reference to Wyman Manderly eating them, but somehow I missed that.
Yeah, he baked them into pies. He calls out for Abel (Mance) to since about the Rat King. In one of the earlier books Bran tells how the Rat King baked some guests into a pie.
Okay, but when and how did he kill them and bake them into pies?