No book for everyone

First, a warning:
This book, as well as the two successor (A Clash of Kings and A Storm Of Swords), does not contain a good-versus-evil-everything-is-good-story. The language is partly explicitly and also bad things happen, such as murder, manslaughter and rape, it even die principals. It is a book for adults.
The author tells in the books is not just a story, it tells of the events in a period of change in this fantasy world. He makes some of the characters in the world speak for themselves, what the reader permitted to see the events from different angles and to form their own judgment.
The action itself is too extensive to admit they resist. There is so much said, it's about political conflicts to honor promises, love, greed, hatred ... in short to the whole of human emotions. It's all kept quite realistic. So plans and intrigues succeed at first, only to be then made later by the events or deeds of others partially destroyed. This is in my opinion very refreshing, because then not always know what will happen. It's happened so many times (in other books) that the main character happens something bad, but you know just exactly that they will overcome this somehow. Since then the only remaining question is how.
Here, however, the voltage formed in such a situation, the fact that one does not know what will happen: the person may die, but it can "only" lose everything or only a part or something. To some people this may be frustrating when your favorite character dies, or can be discovered in him an unsympathetic side. Sometimes the character can not just rule themselves.
The book has a lot of realism in contrast to the typical fantasy romance. It also contains no Hau-the-orc or any Magierspielchen. Overall, it resembles rather the Nibelungen saga as the Lord of the Rings-romance.
The 4 stars I give the book because I do not know the first place, as the epic comes to an end (and then maybe I am annoyed) and secondly because otherwise I would have to give the second part of six stars. The book is rich conversion, has three-dimensional characters, an immense realism, but it is "only" a kind of pilot and it has no end. It's actually not a good idea to look at it individually. One would really only know the entire Song Of Ice And Fire, and then he can be even completely evaluate.