Another star lost for excessive details. I feel like at some point I should really cut Martin a break, but then again I think about how I put over forty hours into finishing this book and I completely change my mind. Story telling shouldn't move at a snail's pace more than half the time. So here is the breakdown of events in this book. People get killed again for unfounded reasons, and others most likely at the end of the book will seem to be killed, but events in the next book will explain how that at the last second they were spared. 
 I almost feel like Maritn does not know where to go with the story, so he just creates some other conspiracy out of the blue to distract the reader for another four hundred pages. So if you are reading this review, I take it most likely you are where I am with your reading of this compendium, and there are things that just as I said don't make sense. Some things happen and you just have to wonder why Martin would make the characters act a certain way, for example: 
 Where we left off with Forest Gump, errr......I mean Samwell Tarley (this was in A Feast for Crows): for some inexplicable reason before he left on a mission to Bravos he never told Jon Snow that his brothers were alive and well. Promise or no promise to Bran, if you had a best friend and had knowledge that his younger half-brothers were alive, wouldn't you just tell him, "Hey, don't tell anyone else, but your brothers are totally not dead." As Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, I think Jon could be trusted to keep mum. 
 Anyway, I don't want to get in a lengthy spiel again about how the details are out of control again, so I cut straight into my own theories about what will possibly happen instead: 
 Theory I - There are to be three Dragon Riders that constantly get mentioned. We have Dany, and her cousin who had been thought to have been killed when he was a baby. (Aegon), so that leaves one more needed Rider (Unless people or Dany just kills her dragon Drogon. Which I think she should do. I mean this dragon was killing kids and eating them. When a pet goes wild, you have to put it down. I mean look what they did to Lady, and Nimeria was the one that attacked Joeffrey.) So anyway, I think that Jon Snow is really a Targaryen. I think his father was Rhagar, and Eddard promised his sister on her death bed that he would tell no one, because he knew that Robert Baratheon would kill the child if he found out, so he hid the child the only way he could, by admitting that he had a marital indiscretion. 
 Theory II - In the end Tyrion will rule the Seven Kingdoms. I like this one, just because it has a Lord of the Rings feel to it. Kinda like, no matter how small, even a dwarf can do amazing things and save the world. 
 Theory III - Eddard Stark is a green-seer and has really been alive this whole time, and he wakes up in a pool of sweat and it's all been a premonition dream, and as he wipes his brow dry he says, "Winter is coming." - close curtain.