I wasn't really sure what to expect reading the next book of this series, but it certainly had lots of surprises. The characters continue to scheme, pillage, sack, burn, and confuse the hell out of me. However, I get a better and better sense of who everyone is and I was finding myself more and more drawn into this world. 
 I felt like this book had a slower start than A Game of Thrones. There was plenty of things happening and certainly a good amount of action too, but it really all felt more like a build up than anything else. I found I could put the book down and not be in huge suspense over what happened next. This isn't exactly a real criticism, but I feel like for the first 75% I wasn't engaged enough to give the book five stars. 
 The last quarter though is a doozy. Oh my goodness, stuff goes down! Twists and turns every chapter and constant suspense and all the while I was just trying to figure out what was happening. It was exciting and hard to put down all of a sudden. Woo! I think my only complaint about this section is also a positive part of this section oddly enough. I found I was oftentimes very confused and unsure what was actually happening. This is fitting with things like battles though, it makes sense that a character won't always know what's going on and what's happening to them and it does make things very dramatic. I had a love/hate with that aspect of the book. 
 I ended up rating it 4/5 stars because I felt it was overall kind of slow much like the first book. The last quarter was easily 5/5 stars though.