Like its predecessors Dance has its share of flagons ’n’ dragons, and swords ’n’ sorcerers, but that doesn’t make Mr. Martin the American Tolkien, as some would have it. He’s much better than that ... Mr. Martin writes fantasy for grown-ups, with a blunt and bawdy earthiness ... The elements of fantasy exist here but are deftly muted, as Mr. Martin defies genre conventions. He’s often more intrigued by the friction among conflicting religions ... All the while his medieval realms ring with echoes of our own time, of our modern terrorscapes that rage with liars, spies and true believers ... Mr. Martin is a literary dervish, enthralled by complicated characters and vivid language, and bursting with the wild vision of the very best tale tellers ... like all proper serials it gives the reader no emotional respite, ending with several razor-sharp question marks as the heavy wheels of fate groan into motion, and the murders and assassinations mount ... the reader is whipsawed by cliffhanger after cliffhanger, while being all too aware that Mr. Martin’s next installment won’t be coming out next week, or even next year for that matter.

A Dance With Dragons brings back several prominent figures who have not been seen directly since A Storm of Swords appeared in 2000. The most welcome of these is Tyrion Lannister, the sardonic dwarf who is perhaps Martin’s most vivid creation ... Any player, however important, can be removed from the board at any moment. This simple fact lends a welcome sense of uncertainty to the proceedings and helps keep the level of suspense consistently high throughout. Filled with vividly rendered set pieces, unexpected turnings, assorted cliffhangers and moments of appalling cruelty, A Dance With Dragons is epic fantasy as it should be written: passionate, compelling, convincingly detailed and thoroughly imagined. Despite a number of overtly fantastic elements (dragons, seers, shape shifters and sorcerers), the book—and the series as a whole—feels grounded in the brutal reality of medieval times and has more in common with the Wars of the Roses than it does with The Lord of the Rings. The result is a complex summer blockbuster with brains and heart, a book with rare—and potentially enormous—appeal.

I was so completely wrapped up in what was happening to everyone that I was only looking up to grunt ... This is a terrific book ... One of Martin’s real strengths...is getting inside the heads of characters and making them seem real ... There’s death and betrayal and dragons and duty and history and complications and pride. These are things nobody does as well as Martin—things I think of as Shakespearean. Council scenes that set up huge complicated betrayals and battles. Heroism and treachery. And you see so much of it from inside people’s heads that it all feels absolutely real and grounded, even the most melodramatic moments ... if you’ve enjoyed the series so far and you’ve been waiting for this volume, then I feel confident in saying that you’re going to love it.

The thousand-page novel is staggeringly dense with interlaced characters, whose complicated interactions stretch back through hundreds of years of lineage, and it stretches to encompass Martin’s entire world, taking in POV characters from the entire series in order to cover events in a dozen locales ... It’s always been a joy to get lost in the flow of his words, even when it’s unclear where they’re leading. And Dragons shows him continuing to develop as a writer: It can be difficult, but it’s richly rewarding. Martin remains boundlessly creative, sketching out intricately realized new civilizations, societies, religions, and factions on one continent while continuing to complicate the established political agendas on another. No part of his world ever feels like an afterthought or an easy fantasy cliché.

Martin's writing, as expected, never meets anything less than the highest standards of literary craft, with many individual chapters good enough to function on their own as award-worthy short stories. Beyond its prose, what I noted about Dance is that it's nothing less than a model of editing ... Martin's work here, together with his editors, is an achievement. The dramatic payoffs may seem a long time coming in Dance. But the point is that they do come ... if you're wondering if Martin has any shockers in store this time...he does.

Dragons is...a brilliantly unified work: Each character is struggling, in his or her own way, to create order out of chaos ... This is top-notch kitchen-sink storytelling—part straightforward pulp, part high fantasy—that will leave you thirsty for more ... When the writing is this good, it’s worth the wait.

A Dance [with] Dragons takes a classic Martin twist and rejoins the two sets of characters to create some hair-raising cliffhangers for the next book ... Martin’s prose is concise but pithy, begging to be devoured over and over again. All the fans’ favorite characters make an appearance, unlike in the last book. But what truly sets this book above some of the others in the series is Martin’s ability to keep his readers on their toes and the edges of their seats. No character, no matter how likeable and seemingly important, is ever safe from Martin’s pen ... for any reader who is not yet a fan, I advise you to become one immediately.

This volume doesn’t tie up many loose ends, but it delivers the tension, political intrigue, emotional impact, and moral ambiguousness that fans expect, and the sinister conclusion foretells a bloody return.

Martin keeps it fresh by focusing on popular characters Tyrion Lannister, Daenerys Targaryen, and Jon Snow, all notably absent from the previous book. These three are generally thought the most plausible riders of the titular dragons, but plots within plots abound, and two strong new candidates for those scaly saddles emerge as a powerful enemy threatens Daenerys's captured city of Meereen ... Even ostensibly disillusioned fans will be caught up in the interweaving stories, especially when Martin drops little hints around long-debated questions such as Jon's parentage.

Fans of the author’s work will likely be satisfied with this volume ipso facto, for it’s vintage Martin: It’s a little cynical, plenty dark, with not many laughs and, truth be told, not much action. There’s the usual blend of exposition, sometimes seemingly endless, and the usual swords-and-sorcery dialogue ... A few hundred pages of this, and one longs in vain for piles of headless corpses and flesh singed with the fire of dragon breath—something, anything, to induce a squeal ... on the evidence, one wonders if Martin isn’t getting a little tired of it.