I Was Promised Dragons. Now I'm An Expert In Fictional Tax Policy and Inheritance Law. Five Stars.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ — A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

Reviewed by Beau Selby, Carrots With Knives

OVERVIEW:

If you’ve seen the show but never read the book, or if you skipped it because you thought it was all blood, brooding, incest, and people wearing entirely too much fur, I have some good news. Well, not for the characters. They’re screwed. But for you.

A Game of Thrones is considerably smarter, more intimate, and more human than its reputation might suggest. Yes, people die. Yes, terrible things happen. Yes, approximately seventeen people are currently plotting to murder someone while you’re reading this sentence. But underneath all the stabbing, political scheming, questionable marriages, and truly catastrophic parenting decisions is a remarkably good book.

Like, annoyingly good.

I went into this fully prepared to explain why the cultural phenomenon had been overhyped. Instead, I am now apparently a person with opinions about House Stark.

This is how fandoms spread.

TONE:

Let’s get something out of the way. If you think A Game of Thrones is nothing but political scheming and misery porn, congratulations, you’ve been watching too much HBO, a sentence I genuinely never expected to write.

The book certainly isn’t cheerful. George R.R. Martin looked at the traditional fantasy concept of good triumphing over evil, overdosed on the history of the Wars of the Roses, and apparently thought, Okay, but what if everyone had childhood trauma? And yet the darkness rarely feels like the point. Martin isn’t brutal because he wants you gawking at brutality. Actions have consequences. Bad decisions matter. Good decisions matter. Being honorable matters.

Unfortunately, being honorable does not necessarily matter in the way Ned Stark would prefer.

Oh, Ned. You magnificent idiot.

This is a man surrounded by human vipers who brings integrity to a knife fight and considers himself well equipped.

I love him.

Someone please stop him.

PACING:

The pacing is phenomenal. This book is around 700 to 800 pages depending on the edition, which sounds like the sort of commitment that should involve a prenuptial agreement and the joining of two minor houses. It does not read like one.

The short, rotating point-of-view chapters are an act of psychological warfare. Martin gets you invested in one character, ends the chapter exactly when you need to know what happens next, and then cheerfully informs you that we’ll be checking in with somebody 900 miles away now. Fine. I’ll read one more chapter. This is how he gets you. Suddenly it’s 1:30 in the morning and you’re furious about the political ramifications of a marriage between two fictional families.

It’s the oldest trick in the book. Literally.

It’s annoying.

But he just does it so damn well.

Eventually you stop resisting and accept that George owns your evening now. Tell your family you’ll see them when winter comes.

CHARACTERS:

This is where Martin really gets me. These people are people. They’re selfish and brave and stupid and clever and honorable and cruel, frequently within several pages of one another.

Tyrion is brilliant, hilarious, wounded, vindictive, compassionate, and occasionally an asshole. Okay, he’s usually an asshole, but he means well.

Sort of.

Shut up.

Catelyn is fiercely intelligent, deeply loving, politically capable, and CONSTANTLY WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING. We all know people like her. You follow their logic the whole way, and then somehow at the finish line they just fall on their face with the dumbest conclusion possible. It’s infuriating. And utterly realistic. Because humans.

I realize this statement will get me murdered by somebody on the internet. Catelyn fans are a whole breed. I have made peace with the fact that they exist.

Ned Stark possesses enough honor for an entire kingdom and approximately none of the survival instincts necessary to live in said kingdom. Every time this man makes a principled decision, somewhere in Westeros a life insurance underwriter wakes up screaming.

And even the children feel like actual children who have been dropped into circumstances no child should have to navigate. Arya, Bran, Sansa, Jon, Robb: they make mistakes that make sense for their ages, misunderstand adults in believable ways, and adapt to a world that seems determined to teach them every possible lesson the hard way.

You understand why these people make their decisions while occasionally wanting to reach through the page, grab them by the shoulders, and explain that THIS IS OBVIOUSLY A TERRIBLE IDEA while shaking them relentlessly.

They will not listen.

I have tried.

BOOK VS. SHOW:

And here’s something I genuinely didn’t expect: the book is less gratuitous than the show. It’s still violent. It still contains disturbing material. Nobody is going to accidentally shelve this next to The Very Hungry Caterpillar. But where the television adaptation sometimes seems a little too delighted with its own ability to traumatize you, Martin’s prose simply lives in a brutal world and lets the consequences do the work. Violence changes people. Death leaves a wake. Horrible things matter after they happen.

Even in the most shocking moments, I never feel like Martin is putting his thumb on the scale. The wake of decisions always feels believable and inevitable while somehow remaining unpredictable. You finish a chapter thinking, Well, obviously that had to happen, despite the inconvenient fact that five pages earlier you had absolutely no idea it was going to happen.

I find this deeply irritating.

Five stars.

The result, strangely enough, is that Westeros can feel more brutal while Martin often has to show you less.

Turns out consequences are pretty effective.

Who knew?

Somewhere an HBO executive just felt a disturbance in the Force and doesn’t know why.

WORLD BUILDING:

Westeros feels old. Not “George R.R. Martin wrote a paragraph explaining that this castle is 4,000 years old” old. Actually old. Families remember grudges whose original participants have been dead for generations. Songs refer to events that have become half-history and half-myth. Castles have changed hands. Religions overlap. Political relationships exist because somebody’s grandfather killed somebody else’s grandfather and apparently everyone has agreed this remains relevant.

Basically, Thanksgiving.

It feels less like Martin invented a world and more like he found one and became the first person unfortunate enough to document its tax policy. Somehow, I mean that as extremely high praise.

And yes, this is high fantasy. I don’t care what the gatekeepers say. There are dragons, direwolves, ancient prophecies, royal bloodlines, magical assassins, undead horrors, an enormous ice wall built by a civilization nobody fully understands, seasons that last for years, and enough named aristocratic families to make you seriously consider keeping notes.

If this isn’t high fantasy, I’ve been shelving my books wrong.

Admittedly, this is possible, as I’m currently preparing to reorganize more than 1,100 books because apparently at some point I looked at a functioning organizational system and thought, We can make this considerably more complicated.

So perhaps I’m not the authority here.

VERDICT:

Five stars.

Not because it’s grim. Not because it kills characters. Not because the politics are complicated or because the lore has enough family trees to keep Ancestry.com afloat.

I’m giving it five stars because somehow Martin took approximately eight hundred pages of feudal politics, ancient grudges, arranged marriages, inheritance disputes, geography, heraldry, bastard children, agricultural concerns, and people discussing who technically owns which castle and made me want more.

That should not work. I cannot stress this enough. I was promised dragons. Now I’m sitting here with opinions about primogeniture.

What the hell happened to me?

If I wanted to spend my free time worrying about inheritance law and dysfunctional rich families fighting over property, I could just watch Succession.

But beneath all of that is an extraordinarily human story. The dialogue is fantastic. The characters are phenomenal. The world feels enormous without requiring a guided tour, and despite its reputation for misery, the book is tremendously entertaining.

If you’ve avoided A Game of Thrones because you don’t think you’re a fantasy person, I might actually be more likely to recommend it to you. Forget the dragons for a minute. This is a story about families, power, loyalty, ambition, love, revenge, terrible judgment, and what happens when several hundred deeply flawed people all become convinced that they are the reasonable one.

You know.

Siblings.

Come for the political drama. Stay for the characters. Accidentally develop strong opinions about the succession laws of a fictional monarchy.

It happens.

And if you’ve already watched the show and think you know this story, read the book anyway. The show gives you a peek into Westeros. The book lets you live in it.

Which is unfortunate, because Westeros is an absolutely terrible place to live.

Seriously. Stay home.