If you pick up this book expecting butterflies and fluffy kittens (or really, peace and beauty at all), you will be sorely disappointed. This is not a happy book, though, luckily, that does not make it a bad book. 
 When I first started reading I was not in the least prepared for the magnitude of detail that I was about to wade into, swim through, or drown in. Martin says, "the devil's in the details", so a book with this much dark contains so many details, by necessity. I kept thinking, "Do I really have to remember all these names?" As it so happens, no. Although I did learn the names of the main players, I went through all 800 pages without truly learning how they were all linked to each other. 
 So yeah... 800 pages. It is a MONSTER book! It's a good thing the writing is brilliant, or I never would have trudged through to page 450, where the plot really began to pick up. The story jumps back and forth between characters, and in doing so, created cliffhanger after gasping cliffhanger. I would groan at the end of each chapter, and flip forward to see how many pages I would have to read to find out what happened to the character next. Then two pages later, I was too involved with the next chapter to care. 
 The true artistry in Martin's writing, is that each character is entirely distinct from the others. It's truly incredible how each member of the cast, though written in the third person, can still have a voice so individual and personal. 
 This book is going to be a tough act to follow...