Quote:
Originally Posted by Indian Chief
Reading Toll the Hounds now. I skipped some of the posts above because it looked like some plot discussion and I'm only a couple hundred pages in.
Non-spoiler reflection on the series though. I love the world, the characters, the story, the writing, pretty much everything but having characters and groups disappear for entire books, maybe even two really breaks my flow. The last half of Reaper's Gale went quickly and then I hit a wall at the start of Toll the Hounds.
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Agree with most of what you say here. Character tracking is the one issue I have with this series and for me it's due to several factors.
-The sheer number of characters both central and non-central to the story
-Unconventional naming makes those names unrecognizable and hard to tie to a character as they are also not gender-indicative
-(As mentioned) characters dropping in and out of timeline
The Song of Ice and Fire books also have multiple characters but it is much easier to track and recognize them thus keeping the flow smooth. Conventional names and affiliation with Houses is a big part of that but RR Martin just does a much better job in that regard IMHO.