For all my whining about how world-building ruins fantasy by turning perfectly good novels into bricks, I actually quite liked this. Perhaps because it wasn't pretending to be anything other than an encyclopaedia. I knew what I was getting into, and it wasn't plot or character. No, I was there for the pretty pretty illustrations, and also the maps. I do like fantasy maps - I only wish that this book hadn't stopped giving them halfway through. I mean, a large chunk of this untold history is of Essos and the other lands, so why leave them out? I'm afraid I started losing interest in the cultures once the maps stopped and I couldn't place them geographically to their environment.

As for the people, eh. It's same old same old for Westeros - lots of violent thugs looking to murder everyone around them at the earliest opportunity. Not much new there. The artwork, however, was excellent.