TITLE: The Ice Dragon
AUTHOR: George R R Martin
FORMAT: Hardback
ILLUSTRATIONS: Luis Royo
PUBLISHED: 2014 (this edition – story originally 1980)
I picked The Ice Dragon up at a bookstore because it was cheap and also short. I estimated it to be a novelette. I love GRRM’s stories, but I’m not always a fan of his writing style. In fact, the last thing of his I read I found incredibly boring. But I quite enjoyed Fevre Dream in graphic form and Game of Thrones on the screen. So I wanted to give him another shot.
Four dollars later, this was mine.
As far as I knew, I was reading a short story that he did, and I was a little surprised to see it in chapter form, but not totally.
The story follows Adara, who is different and also the reason her mother died in childbirth. While her father adores her siblings, she gets left to mostly her own devices, and ends up befriending an Ice Dragon, which nobody does.
I liked the story. It was written more simply than his normal stuff, which means I wasn’t bogged down by unnecessary words and overly-long descriptions. I found out later that the reason was that it’s actually a children’s book (Note: the bookstore hadn’t specified that. I found it on the internet when I tried to look up word count)
So I guess the key here is that GRRM needs to write for Children for me to want to read it.
Still, the ending was annoying to me. It was predictable and went in exactly the opposite direction from where I wanted it to go.
So a rating. Whatever genre you want it to be, it was a nice story up until the very end. I’ll give it a healthy 3/5. Go ahead and give yourself a bit to read it, but don’t expect the most amazing story ever.
Book In The Bag 