Borrowed from local library.

I am not a fan of Martin. That being said, Fire & Blood is a good, honest representation of his writing. It is professional, ultra-complex with twists and turns galore and filled with both bloody battles and intrigues and much fornicating and ribald/vulgar scenes in profusion. Granted this is a book of historical fantasy in a world with dragons and dragon-riders. In other words, not a thinly veiled picture of some actual historical period...unless someone knows otherwise?
But for my own tastes, Martin fails at one of the prime elements that I need to have to truly get wrapped up in any book: that is he does not have a protagonist who you can't help but cheer for. I have read much of his Game of Thrones series and did cheer for several characters at different points in the stories...I think he managed to kill each and every one of them with a handful of chapters.
Oh, Martin is a talented writer, don't get me wrong. F&B could easily become a hit on TV or in the movies, there is enough action, enough intrigue, enough death and gore and lots and lots of sex, most of it twisted (he seems to have chosen incest as his favorite form of intercourse to promote in both of these series...they are both set in the same universe/world so maybe that is the only connection...). Again, finding ways to gain support for incest is another reason I found this objectionable. I have read mysteries that have vigilante killers as "likeable" protagonists and hired assassins and other varieties of swashbuckling sexually active major characters, etc., but these all ultimately leave a sour taste in my mouth for one reason or another.
F&B may become a major day time action story that will run either as a regular show or in syndication. The biggest problem for that to happen is that the cast is too big, there must have been literally thousands of names over the 700 pages. But GRR Martin is a man of our time. His writing sells and sells big. Too bad there is no happy ending nor positive value being promoted. I guess he does promote integrity of character/action...but even men of integrity are often abandoned by those they protected.
Really, just not my cup of tea. ( )

Ok I didn’t really finish this book. I read one chapter and that’s all I could stand. It’s not really a narrative story so much as the worst, most boring textbook ever ( )

Written like a history book. Easy to read. I found this very interesting. ( )

This is phenomenal--just don't go into it thinking it's like the main series.

In short, this is a "history" book. It's a scholar compiling accounts of the earlier Targaryans. So it reads more like a textbook. There are multiple accounts of the same scenarios as this scholar pulls from different sources, and the veracity of various ones are up for debate. But if you go into it seeing it for what it is--an extra lore book--this is a great read. It's got great art, neat family trees, further accounts of things that were mentioned in the books but not really delved into, and so on. ( )

The best way to describe this 740-page work is as a fictional historical generational saga. I read the five-part A Song of Fire & Ice series after I saw the first season of A Game of Thrones on HBO, and I do not think I would have been able to keep track of all the characters in the books if I had not seen the show and had some kind of visual memory. Although this is not the much-awaited sixth book in the A Song of Fire & Ice series, The Winds of Winter, Fire & Blood does continue that Westerosi fantasy world building in the other direction: it starts about 300 years before the first events in A Game of Thrones, when Aegon I and his sister-wives, Rhaenys and Visenya, conquered Westeros on their dragons. It is their descendants who come to rule over Westeros for the rest of the next three centuries.

This prequel (I use that term loosely) is written as a fictional history compiled by one of the scholars from Oldtown’s Citadel, Archmaester Gyldayn. As such, it is at times as dry, impersonal, and hard to follow as any high school pre-digested history book, although there are amusing commentaries by the Archmaester when he cites his (fictional) sources, mostly other maesters and archmaesters and an interesting dwarf, who was a court fool for years, named Mushroom. I did struggle to stay with this book at times, because of this sometimes boring, detached narrative style, and I struggled to care what happened to the wretched characters, perhaps, in part because it was dry history rather than some omniscient narrator giving us their inner thoughts and feelings. For this reason, the characters were largely two-dimensional, at best, and I could not invest myself in their lives the way I might otherwise have. In this case, I am counting on the upcoming HBO series, House of the Dragons, to strip away the unnecessary details and focus on some character development that would help make the story more memorable.

Largely, this tome is the glorious, ruinous history of the Targaryen family in Westeros over the first 150 years after the conquering by Daenerys Targaryen’s great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather (I have no idea if I have the right number of “greats” as the bloodline veers back and forth over generations). Apparently, a second book is planned, as the events in this book cover only half the pre-Fire & Ice period, according to the timeline at the back of the book, which takes us closer to the events at the beginning of A Game of Thrones. Also, apparently, in an interview Martin himself referred to this planned duology as his “GRRM-arillion,” in a nod to J.R.R. Tolkein’s Silmarillion (which was put together posthumously by Tolkein’s son, Christopher, from background writings and notes Tolkein had saved during his writings of the Ring Trilogy). This book dragged at times – a lot of times, actually, and I had trouble staying with it – but then had stellar moments.

Like the Song of Fire & Ice series, there is a lot of sex, murder, political intrigue, war, spectacular dragon fights, arranged (often fatalistic) marriages, ambiguous moral characters, sexual assault, illegitmate vs. trueborn royal children. As with that series, though, it is sometimes over the top for me, e.g., whole cities of women being violently raped and pillaged, hideous maiming, etc. On the other hand, there were women in this book, not necessarily only those with dragons, who had far more agency than the women in later Westeros.

And I would be remiss if I did not comment on the spectacular black-and-white illustrations by Doug Wheatley. I would say that depictions of some of the characters helped, but they each occupied such a short period of time that remembering them was still hard. ( )