The Game of Thrones


“ He took hold of Ice with both hands and said,” In the name of Robert of the House Baratheon, the first of his name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the first Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and protector of the Realm, by word of Eddard of the House Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, I do sentence you to die.” He lifted his great sword high above his head.” George R. R. Marin writes this challenging book The Game of Thrones which pulls you in and keeps you reading. He sets the story in something like early Europe, describing everything to the smallest detail, with few bad things.

The people in this book are like the ones in early Europe. With a king, lords, knights and pheasants each with their own duty. The king rules the land making and using his men to enforce them. The lords each own a large amount of land with pheasants to work it and knights to protect the people and defend their land. When a time of war comes the lords can call their people to their hold fast and take all the able bodied men to fight. Winter is another time the people gather at the hold fast. The lord will tell the people to save a portion of their harvest and they will live in the town around the castle. All of this described to the smallest detail.

The imagery in this book is amazing. Once into the book the places just seem to float off the page. The sights, sounds and smells just come off the page. When a character is in a castle it felt like i was seeing the the eyes of the character and knew the castle front and back. The godswood pops right off the page, with the hot springs and heart tree seeming almost real to me. The battles go on with men I seemed to know dieing on both sides of me. But there are so drawbacks to this wonderful book.
The main thing is that the book is long, about 700 pages, but that just means I got to enjoy it longer. Those 700 hundred pages aren’t short either. They are huge with words about as small as they can make them. This book is written for a college age so the younger readers may need to read with a dictionary beside them so they understand all the words. The chapters are set in a way that I never seen before. The book has about six more characters and the story is told from each of their viewpoints in a random order. Without a good memory the book can get confusing fast. Overall I thought the book was good.
This book has the perfect setting with men riding into battle on horses carrying swords or spears in hand to hand fighting. These battles are described magnificently along with the castles or Fields they are fought on. There are some things in this that could be considered bad to some people but a good reader will just think they make the book better. Men were executed many different ways but the most common was taking off their head with a sword the way Eddard did. He used his the Stark’s sword Ice for the execution and when he dies he will pass the sword to his heir along with the duty. Now I am passing this book to you so you can pass it on to others.