Lornographic Material

If you ever want to see grown women defend the sexualization of preteen girls, all you must do is bring up how Mr. Martin handles the relationship between Daenerys and Drogo. All walks of life will come to Martin's defense with the utterly asinine argument that "Back in the day, little girls were sold into marriage all the time!" Ah, but this isn't back in the day, is it? This is Westoros, a mythical land. It's not Earth circa Black Plague. It's not medieval England. It's not Persia or Egypt or Jared Fogle's basement computer. It's all fiction. But I guess that's what makes it okay, right? I mean, if I chose to paint pictures of naked children involved in sexual congress with adults, it would be cool so long as I didn't use child models, right? My point is this: Martin choseto write descriptive sex scenes involving a thirteen-year-old girl, and these scenes are written in such a way as to be tantalizing. He uses the same verbiage as erotica. If you're cool with that, that's on you. That, above all else, is why I gave this otherwise terrific book two stars.

Some of you (you know who you are), gave this book five stars while writing one-star reviews of Lolita that read something to the tune of "This is disgusting. What kind of person would write something like this?" My, my, aren't we wishy-washy on the subject of fictional child sex.

In summation: Book One in the Icy Hot series is pretty all right if you can get past the simulated kiddie porn. I enjoyed the HBO series enough to purchase all of the audiobooks all at once. This is me working my way through them. I do hate that, by the time Martin writes the rest of these books, the narrator Roy Dotrice will likely be in an advanced state of decay. That's gonna suck, because I enjoy the way he reads these books. But he's even older than Martin, and Martin is two Snickers bars short of a diabetic coma and a Red Bull away from heart failure.

Final Judgment: Acceptable child pornography.