Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Last week I finished reading A Clash Of Kings, the sequel to A Game of Thrones. As I said before, this series came highly recommended, and it still hasn’t disappointed me. A Clash of Kings picks up right where A Game of Thrones “ended”. I put “ended” in quotes, because while I did reach the end of the physical book (there weren’t any more pages) , but the story didn’t get wrapped up that much.

Again, this book has lots of extremely well developed characters and lots of plot twists and turns. The characters mostly fall into the “gray” between good and evil, so you don’t always not whether to root for or against a character. And a few times, when you think you have a character figured out, you get proven wrong.

And it, for the most part, continues to be realistic (relative to the genre). And the story continues to be suspenseful since we only get bits and pieces of the story and background. In lots of other books, the whole background circumstances are clearly laid out, so you can easily predict what’s going to happen.

This book did move a bit slowly. The individual chapters are still very engaging, but the overall plot didn’t progress that much. I keep hoping that at least one character will resolve nicely and “ride into the sunset”, but no such luck so far. I’m very curious to see how this all wraps up eventually.

One thing that is starting to bother me is this feeling that the scale is not quite right. The armies involved range from 10,000 to sometimes over 100,000. I’m not sure the land mass described would actually be able to support that many people given a medieval era technological base. I know, it’s a really nerdy thing to be bothered by, but “I am what I am”. :-)

So, in case it wasn’t obvious, it you liked the first book, I’d strongly recommend the this one.