A Clash of Kings: A Song of Fire and Ice Book 2

Title: A Clash of Kings

Author: George R. R. Martin

Published: November 16, 1998 by Bantam Books

Price: $9.99 on Kindle.

☆☆☆/5

Blurb: A comet the color of blood and flame cuts across the sky. Two great leaders—Lord Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon—who hold sway over an age of enforced peace are dead, victims of royal treachery. Now, from the ancient citadel of Dragonstone to the forbidding shores of Winterfell, chaos reigns. Six factions struggle for control of a divided land and the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms, preparing to stake their claims through tempest, turmoil, and war.

It is a tale in which brother plots against brother and the dead rise to walk in the night. Here a princess masquerades as an orphan boy; a knight of the mind prepares a poison for a treacherous sorceress; and wild men descend from the Mountains of the Moon to ravage the countryside. Against a backdrop of incest and fratricide, alchemy and murder, victory may go to the men and women possessed of the coldest steel…and the coldest hearts. For when kings clash, the whole land trembles.

Review: This legit took me a whole month to read. Not because it was bad, it was just so long and mostly filled with all that royal political talk and lists of names that I couldn’t be bothered to care about.

When it got away from that though, oh man. I wanted more of that! Save the political talk for the bit of filler from scene to scene, make the story about the other stuff! About the mystery, the action, the drama. Granted, politics is drama enough for some people, but I’m not one of those people. I don’t care about politics.

There was a part that almost made me want to stop reading, but in a good way. It made me feel and get mad at the author in a good way, in an invested way. In a way that makes me want to reach through and just smack the author a good one for putting me through that.

Now, why did I give this book 3 stars when I’m raving about how feel good the book was, you may be asking? Well, that’s because the feel good was few and far between. It was common enough to keep me reading, but every time it started to get exciting again, it would go right back to the politics. Them sitting around talking about things that I have no interest in. It’s actually one of the main reasons that I’m so wary of medieval and royal types of books. Politics. I see enough of that in my real life, I’d rather avoid it when I can, even if it is fiction.

Thank you for reading my review.