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As far as book sequels go (to A Game of Thrones, that is), A Clash of Kings is a good one. It follows all the characters we loved and hated from the first book into “What happened next”, expands the world to more places and kingdoms, is that much a bit darker and magical than the first one. But I still have three gripes about it.

First, there are too many narratives. In the first book, you had roughly 3 (Eddard Stark becoming Hand of the king, Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow), but at least they were at times directly inter-connected. Not so much in this second book. All story arcs are affected by some global events, for sure, but their main protagonists seldom interact with each other directly, if any. It really feels like a collection of short stories within the same universe, and not much more.

Second, there are way too many important characters. Maybe it’s because it took me too long to read the book, but often it would mention the arrival of character X, and I’d react with “… And who’s that?”. This makes it quite a challenge to follow what’s going on, and challenges you to decide quickly, when introduced with a batch of characters, if you should care about them or not depending if they’re going to be killed or forgotten within a few chapters. I know there are appendices with all the main Houses and Kingdoms, but so many characters listed there are not even used in the book that, apart from seldom reference, they don’t tell you who’s important or not (like a movie poster would do, for example).

Finally, with such a breath of new characters, it seems the main characters are less internally developed than in the first book. It is quite often difficult to guess the inner motivations of many of them, for example Theon Greyjoy, to the point where many of them do not feel much lifelike. I guess I’m asking too much for a fantasy novel.

In the end though, it was quite worth the effort as it was overall enjoyable. More interestingly will be to see how that massive story will be adapted for the television by HBO in the following months.