Abi Sutherland:
Making Light: A Dance with Dragons, with Spoilers: Smaug looked down at the wilting bunch of flowers in his claw, then up at the door in front of him. “I don’t think this is a very good idea.”
“Go on,” urged Yevaud. “Just ring the bell. When she comes out, say she looks beautiful in that dress and give her the corsage.”
“We could go burn a village or something instead,” Smaug countered brightly. “That would be fun. That would be much more fun than this.”
“She asked you to the prom. You said yes. Now you have to go through with it. And can you hurry it up? We still have to get my date, and figure out where Maur is. He was supposed to…” Yevaud’s voice trailed off.
Smaug, having rung the doorbell, turned to see what had struck his friend dumb. He was still staring when his date came out of her door and stopped dead in her tracks.
Maur sauntered toward them, enjoying the attention. Around his neck, lying rather crooked between his great dorsal spines, was a long strip of red satin. The ends met in a neat bow at the front. “Hey, guys, how’s it going? Do you like my tie?”
By the end of the evening, Yevaud will have lost his date to the griffin doing security at the door. Maur will be kicked out of the prom for knocking over the chaperones’ table with his tail while trying to break dance. The ordinarily quiet Oolong will fly off with the homecoming queen, to the ruin of her reputation on campus. And Smaug will ask his date to go steady with him. She will say yes, and one day they will marry. Her parents will come round eventually.
Alyssa Rosenberg:
On ‘A Dance With Dragons’ | ThinkProgress: I’ve long been a defender of the idea that George R.R. Martin will definitely finish A Song of Ice and Fire, less on the grounds that I have faith in the man himself, and more on the rationale that capitalism is powerful, and HBO doesn’t mess around. But while I though certain parts of A Dance With Dragons were profoundly moving and very effectively structured, the novel as a whole left me with grave concerns that Martin has a coherent master plan to bring the story to a manageable conclusion. I’d expected that this would be the point in the series when events—if not Martin’s world as a whole—would start to contract and gain momentum as the story moves towards a central conflict.
I was wrong. Instead of focusing, the story adds points of view and conflicts. Now, instead of one surviving Targaryen, we’ve got two—Aegon, Rheager’s son, is apparently alive and well and bumming around with Rheager’s childhood best friend, Jon Connington. Davos Seaworth is off on a mad quest to find Rickon Stark, one of the most invisible characters in the entire series. Mance Rayder is alive and well and living, if not in Paris, at least in Westeros. The Horn of Winter is apparently still out there, maybe on Victarion’s ship, maybe in Sam’s cache of dragonglass. We’re tangled up in a comparative anthropology of sellsword companies. It’s exhausting. And I think the only way to continue reading the novels is to focus your emotional energies on a couple of key storylines and characters. So while these thoughts are by no means complete, they’re the things that grabbed me most strongly on a first read of A Dance With Dragons...
