I Read The Book Everyone Already Watched And Somehow It Still Got Me

Yeah I watched the show first, I know, cardinal sin, everybody in every comment section will tell you so. Went in anyway because I wanted to know what all the fuss actually was about on the page, not the screen, and I’m glad I did even knowing basically every twist already.

It’s a genuinely huge cast, chapters named for whichever character’s head you’re in that section, and it took me a good hundred pages to stop mixing up which Frey was which. But once it clicks, it clicks hard. Nobody main is safe here, that’s the whole engine of the book, you attach to a Stark and the story just, doesn’t care, kills them anyway. Martin also skips almost all the usual fantasy furniture, there’s no wizards throwing fireballs around, it’s swords and politics and betrayal doing all the work instead.

The scene that’s stuck with me hardest, and it’s not a subtle one, is Dany eating the raw horse heart at her wedding. One reviewer described the whole reading experience as basically eating raw horse heart and washing it down with the strongest mead in the realm, which honestly sums up the tone of this whole book better than I could. It is brutal like that, on purpose, over and over.

Random thing I want to shout out because nobody else does, the audiobook narration by Roy Dotrice is apparently incredible, multiple people said it’s the only reason they got through all 800-something pages, giving every single character their own distinct voice. And somebody just said, plainly, “I like the font.” Which, sure, why not, that’s a review too.

Five stars. It’s long, it’s dense with names and houses and family trees you’ll flip back to constantly, and I’m already looking at book two.