A Storm of Swords: Volume Three of A Song of Ice and Fire

Okay, so as my two readers are probably sick of hearing, I am working through the A Song of Ice and Fire books by George RR Martin. And you're probably tired of this being the only news from me. Well the new book A Dance with Dragons is supposed to come out on the 21st this month so, tough cookies. I'm going to get this series finished by then and you can just deal with it. Why? Because I'm the reviewer and you both are the readers, that's why! I'm sure the two of you have more interesting things to do so I'll just ramble to myself for the rest of the review until I realize I should be doing something useful.

Okay, if anyone's still reading at this point, I think I'm just going to avoid talking about the plot as much as possible. The main problem is that there are so many spoilers that go on with so many different changes and surprises and murders, oh dear yes lots of murder. Really to try and talk about the book without spoiling would be nearly impossible. So I'm just going to talk about the book as a whole rather than delving into the plot. I know this is kind of a difference from my other reviews because this book series is very plot-driven so to ignore the plot is almost criminal of me. If you're going to read the book the plot is too good to spoil for you now, and if you already read the book then you know the plot and I don't need to discuss it here! So we'll pretend that's an adequate response and I'll just move on to my opinions of the book.

Quite frankly, Storm of Swords is my favorite book in the series by far. There are huge epic battle scenes where awesome people do awesome things. Davos Seaworth has some truly epic scenes, not so much battles as it is political and social intrigue, which cement him as my favorite character by far. Jon Snow does some epic stuff up north, Sansa Stark finally grows a spine, the Arya Stark plot finally moves forward, Danerys starts being awesome and we start seeing Jamie Lannister stop being such a jerk. (Sorry, I guess I ended up talking a little about the plot anyway.) The sheer amount of character development that goes into this book is just wonderful. And the awesome battles are pretty good too.

Okay, okay, there's smut in this book too. I've kind of accepted it's part of these books except for once the smut actually works in the book. It's not just "oh by the way they're having sex right now" it's smut relevant to the plot. Finally I wasn't really bugged by the smut because it was woven seamlessly into the plot rather than being some sort of extra. For that I am thankful and I hope it remains this way in the future.

As you can probably guess, I really liked this book and hope the rest of the series meet its standard. Very easily earns itself five sheep.

BAK