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noah_hurts 's review for:
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
by George R.R. Martin
I described this short story collection to a fellow A Song of Ice and Fire fan as "The good books with lots of the good stuff except most of the characters you like and the Bran chapters." Now seeing as there are only three of these short stories (despite GRRM's insistence that he will write seven more) this set does feel very good, but far from complete. There's no finite ending here, but that aside this collection is far more good than it is bad. Dunk and Egg feels like nearly all of the good aspects of the core series books condensed into roughly 100 pages each. Dunk, a big/dumb (but a lot more clever than I think GRRM meant for him to be) hedge knight and his young squire, Egg, with a pedigree far more important than he leads on travel all over Westeros, accidentally stumbling into conspiracies and important battles. Does it feel a little convenient and deus ex machina-y, absolutely yes. Does that make it less interesting? Not in the slightest, oh goodness. The key point of importance in this set though seems to be GRRM's explanation of the Blackfyre Rebellions, something at this point only really known to regular skulkers of the series wiki. Methinks this means that this Blackfyre nonsense will end up being far more important in the future core series books, but of course I could just be reading too far into GRRM's hopeless devotion to mythologizing his series.
At the end of the day, the Dunk and Egg short stories are a fantastic and easy read that flesh out some of a very interesting period of Westeros history. Most interesting of all is the fact that at this point in time (approximately 100 years before the start of A Game of Thrones) when there are oodles of Targaryens wandering about the Seven Kingdoms and beyond. My only complaint? It seems like the damn Targaryen family has only three family names. No GRRM, I am entirely unable to keep every single Aegon, Aemon, Daemon, Daeron, Baelor, and Aerion straight because for the love of the Seven, they're all too similar.
Read this though; it's really good fun and lets you stave off the dry spell we find ourselves in just a for a few hours.
At the end of the day, the Dunk and Egg short stories are a fantastic and easy read that flesh out some of a very interesting period of Westeros history. Most interesting of all is the fact that at this point in time (approximately 100 years before the start of A Game of Thrones) when there are oodles of Targaryens wandering about the Seven Kingdoms and beyond. My only complaint? It seems like the damn Targaryen family has only three family names. No GRRM, I am entirely unable to keep every single Aegon, Aemon, Daemon, Daeron, Baelor, and Aerion straight because for the love of the Seven, they're all too similar.
Read this though; it's really good fun and lets you stave off the dry spell we find ourselves in just a for a few hours.