Throughout the novel, we see more and more, just enough of it to keep us interested, but only marginally more overt than the first book. In A Clash of Kings, we see more magic than we saw in the first book (indeed, we see some at work in the Prologue). It wasn’t until the very end of the novel that we started to see some hints of magic that still lingered in the world. There wasn’t a good explanation for this, but that’s because no one really seemed to know why. People knew that magic used to exist, but much of it had disappeared. One of the things that impressed me about A Game of Thrones was that the “magic” in the story was only hinted at.
There are three things that I think Martin does masterfully in A Clash of Kings (and remember, I am a recent convert to epic fantasy, thanks to A Game of Thrones): Some of the new viewpoints are familiar characters, like Theon Grayjoy, but this is the first time we see things unfolding from his eyes. Some of these characters we are familiar with and some of the them are new. I counted 9 viewpoint characters throughout the novel (10 if you can’t the Maester in the prologue, who we never return to). Outside of that, A Clash of Kings was a rather breathtaking book that carries the story forward from where A Game of Thrones left off and mixes in some new viewpoint characters along the way. Five stars is a hard rating to come by and a hard rating to match and while I didn’t give A Clash of Kings 5-stars (I give it 4), it is only because some of the novelty of the style in which Martin tells his story is no longer new. ¬†I gave Game of Thrones a 5-star rating. Martin’s A Clash of Kings, the second book in the Song of Ice and Fire series.
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