(No spoilers in this post.)

So it took me about four months to read this book, but as I’ve mentioned before, it’s not because I wasn’t enjoying it. It’s just a result of my weird spread-out reading habits where I only read small chunks once in a while and sometimes go days without opening the book. But, whatever, I finished it yesterday, and now I want to talk about it.

FYI, I have not watched the series (Game of Thrones) yet. I saw the first episode and decided to stop and read some of the books instead. I’ll probably get back to it at some point, but for now I’m more interested in the novels than in the TV show.

Game of Thrones was a pretty fantastic read, but A Clash of Kings was even better. The story is becoming so complex with all the characters fighting for power or honour or revenge or just survival. It’s all brilliantly orchestrated, but more than anything else it’s the character development that makes this such a great series. The characters don’t fall into a simplistic good vs. evil categorization. As a reader, you get inside the heads of various characters from every side of the power struggle and you understand their motivations. You may not approve of their actions, but you at least know where they are coming from and you empathize with them. There are a few characters who are really deceitful or manipulative or power-hungry or greedy or cruel, but I think even the worst of them have some humanity. You’re either given a backstory that explains how they became who they are, or you’re given enough flavour and nuance that you can tell there are complex thoughts and emotions driving those characters’ actions, hinting at a story you don’t have access to, which may or may not be revealed further down the series.

What’s amazing, too, is that it’s not just the primary characters who are developed like this. What I mean by “primary characters” is those who have their own chapters. The novels are divided into small chapters, each one from the perspective of a specific character. The prose is in the third person, but it’s subjective: you only have access to the thoughts of that one character for the duration of the chapter. In A Clash of Kings, there are 69 chapters divided (unequally) between 9 characters. So of course those 9 characters are very well developed, but there are also a few really important characters who don’t get their own chapters and yet you get to know them almost as intimately simply based on their interactions with the “primary” characters, their dialogue, etc. The most striking example is Queen Cersei, but there’s also Varys, Stannis, Renley, Maester Luwin, Robb, the “Old Bear,” etc.

I want to talk about some of the characters more specifically, but I’ll do so in separate posts. There will be spoilers in my more in-depth look at the various characters.

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