A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire #3)

I innitially picked up this series because of the copious rewiews i read which mentioned how much better this series was than the book being reviewed. When I began reading however, there were so many characters, so many convoluted relationships between the characters, and absolutely no need for most of the extranious and downright confusing information which Martin weaves into his story. I have always wondered what a book would be like if the heroes lost. If it was evil that was triumphant. After reading the first three books of this series, i can tell you that it is a failure. Not only is it maddening and disheartening, it is amazingly depressing. I must admit that there are points where one feels joy, and elation at the fortune of one of the villians, but all such moments are short-lived, as the plot invariably falls back to the downward spiral of death and destruction on the side of the heroes, and triumph on the side of the villians. In addition to the confusing characters and relationships contained whithing the books, Martin takes a rather simple approach to the presentation of the story. He only tells of one action at a time from one characters firsthand point of view, with sparse second and third-hand speculation by other characters. In short, it is a grand attempt at a tale of epic proportions, but it ends up as a depressing horror as all whom the reader comes to love, become separated from those who they love, and invariably end up in a 'Hell on Earth' or dead.Show Less