Andrea

I liked the book and would recommend it if you like more politics and ideals driven books but the main thing I wanted to address was the audio. Alot of people seem to have issues with it and I will admit that the voices may be a little over dramatic but in general its pretty straight forward. One person narrates the quotes at the beginning of each chapter and then the main narrator, Simon Vance covers most of the rest except for things specifically in quotations which are divided by character and voiced by different narrators. Since this does not include internal thoughts that the characters aren't represented as actually saying and Vance does imbue some character related "voicing" to the thoughts as would normally be done in a single reader rendition it does somewhat seem to lead to some of the main characters having 2 sometimes distict "voices" but it does make sense and it really isn't that difficult to follow. I doubt I would have noticed it if I hadn't read the reviews of everyone complaining about it. I guess basically my point is not to let the complaints scare you away from a good book.

I disagree with many of the comments up to this point. Yes there is a different reader and yes there are some slight differences in pronunciation but nothing that makes the book unenjoyable. True he's no Dotrice but sometimes things change and there is no help for it. Also there are not nearly as many new characters as some of the other reviews imply and I didn't find anything confusing about the timeline. In general I'd agree that there is less substance to this book and it is unfortunate that you see less of some of the characters that you've learned to like (of course Martin being who he is he's killed a number of them off so its really no wonder). This book comes across as a place filler between the last and next book in the series but if you've enjoyed the books up to this point I'd say that its worth continuing. Just be warned going in that there are some changes both in the narration as well as in the book itself. Don't expect it to be something its not and its a perfectly enjoyable book.