Well, I guess we know now why Martin took so long to release this latest volume: it's a steaming mess.

Forget for a moment the fact that of the many principal POV characters, only one (Jon Snow) has any discernible character arc throughout the tome's 940+ pages. Forget too that the only female POV characters (Cersei and Dany, and even Asha in her first chapter) can scarcely go two pages without pining lustily and pathetically for their male paramours. Don't trouble yourself with the chapters (Victarion, Davos) that could have been told more effectively in three sentence flashbacks in the next installment. And sure, one storyline features a character to whom we have never been introduced (Quentyn), forced to spend dozens of pages on, only to have that character fail to be an interesting character or a consequence to the larger narrative. So what?

The larger issue is this: Martin has created a wondrous, fully-realized world in which many people (including myself) are happy to spend a great deal of time. He's just forgotten that he's supposed to be advancing a story within that world. Instead he spins his wheels. Nearly all the action takes place in a far-flung city operating within an alien (and uninteresting) civilization with a unique set of moral norms, with no apparent consequences for the people with whom we've already spent four books and 4000 pages with. Some characters don't advance at all from the beginning of this book's action; worse, some characters end up back where they began several books before.

It's as if J.K. Rowling decided to create a book between 4 and 5, with the great bulk of time devoted to Hermione's wanderings in Dobby's homeland instead of Hogwarts. What a misfire.