The Book Behind the Fifth Season of the Acclaimed HBO Series Game of Thrones. In the aftermath of a colossal battle, the future of the Seven Kingdoms hangs in the balance—beset by newly emerging threats from every direction.
“It is not the foes who curse you to your face that you must fear, but those who smile when you are looking and sharpen their knives when you turn your back.”
The Long and Winding Road: A Look at George R.R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons
Few books arrive burdened with the weight of anticipation that A Dance with Dragons carried. The fifth volume in George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy saga, A Song of Ice and Fire, arrived in 2011 – a full six years after its predecessor, A Feast for Crows. Fans had waited breathlessly for the return of beloved characters sidelined in the previous book, eager to see storylines converge and the overarching narrative march closer to its icy and fiery conclusion.
What Martin delivered was a beast of a book, sprawling across nearly 1,000 pages, picking up the threads of Daenerys Targaryen, Tyrion Lannister, Jon Snow, Bran Stark, and many others largely absent from Feast. While ambitious, intricately plotted, and undeniably essential to the series, A Dance with Dragons is also a deeply flawed and often frustrating reading experience, feeling less like a vital chapter and more like a necessary, albeit unwieldy, bridge.
The novel largely runs concurrently with A Feast for Crows, following characters primarily in the East and North. Daenerys Graveyard is trying to rule the slave city of Meereen, a tumultuous, politically charged quagmire that quickly becomes the narrative’s gravitational pull – and for many, its primary drag. Tyrion, disgraced and on the run, embarks on a lengthy journey across Essos, his path intersecting with new players and old allies alike. Jon Snow grapples with the near-impossible task of commanding the Night’s Watch, balancing ancient vows with the terrifying, existential threat looming beyond the Wall.
On the surface, Martin’s signature strengths are all present. His prose is immersive, his world-building meticulous, and his ability to craft morally complex characters remains unparalleled. Several character arcs in ADWD are stunningly executed. Theon Greyjoy’s chapters, recounting his horrific transformation into “Reek,” are harrowing and profound, offering a deeply moving exploration of identity, trauma, and redemption (or lack thereof). Jon Snow’s perspective provides a compelling look at leadership under duress, forcing him to make increasingly difficult and controversial decisions. Tyrion’s journey through exile, while sometimes meandering, strips him bare and forces a painful reckoning.
However, these high points are frequently dwarfed by the book’s significant structural and pacing problems. The most commonly cited issue is the “Meereenese Knot” – Daenerys’s storyline. While thematically relevant (showing that ruling is far harder than conquering), her chapters become stagnant, bogged down in internal political struggles that feel repetitive and delay her inevitable return west. The pacing is often glacial, with long stretches dedicated to travel, political maneuvering, or seemingly minor character interactions that contribute little immediate momentum to the larger plot.
Furthermore, A Dance with Dragons introduces a host of new POV characters late in the game (Quentyn Martell, Victarion Greyjoy, Jon Connington), each bringing their own considerable baggage and adding yet more complex threads to a tapestry already bursting at the seams. While their perspectives offer valuable glimpses into other parts of the world and new political factions, they also dilute the focus and feel like setup for future books rather than integral components of this one. This constant expansion, intriguing in earlier volumes, starts to feel unwieldy when readers are anticipating resolution.
The biggest frustration, perhaps, is the book’s sense of conclusion, or lack thereof. A Dance with Dragons famously ends on a series of abrupt cliffhangers, leaving many pivotal character arcs unresolved and the overall state of Westeros and Essos in even greater uncertainty than before. While Martin’s series thrives on unpredictability and consequence, ADWD feels less like an installment with its own narrative arc and more like the first half of a larger, unfinished volume, chopped arbitrarily.
In essence, A Dance with Dragons is a book that demands patience and rewards selective moments rather than providing a consistently engaging narrative flow. It contains some of Martin’s finest character work and expands the scope of his world in fascinating ways, but it does so at the expense of pacing and narrative focus. It feels bloated, at times directionless, and ultimately serves more as an elaborate staging ground for future conflicts than a satisfying story in its own right.
For die-hard fans of A Song of Ice and Fire, A Dance with Dragons is non-negotiable – essential reading to keep up with the sprawling narrative and the fate of beloved, or reviled, characters. But approached critically, it stands as the most challenging entry in the series thus far, a testament to Martin’s ambitious vision but also to the difficulties in marshaling such complexity into a cohesive, propulsive novel. It reinforces the series’ greatness in flashes, while also highlighting the structural strains under which that greatness now operates. It’s a book you must read if you’re committed to the journey, but one you’re unlikely to revisit for pleasure as often as its sharper, more dynamic predecessors.