Portraits of His Children [Paperback]

It's unfortunate that Amazon has not chosen to separate the reviews for Kindle editions from the physical editions, mainly because Kindle editions are sometimes poorly transcribed, with formatting errors and typos (while the physical editions were put through a more thorough and competent editing process).

But in the case of Portraits of His Children, the quality of the text itself is not the issue. The problem here is that the buyer is given the impression that this Kindle edition will contain the same 11 short stories found in the paperback edition of the same name. This impression is due to Amazon's practice of lumping all the reviews together, Kindle and otherwise.

However, despite Amazon's claim that you're getting the same 11-story compilation in Kindle form, you're not. This is just the one short story, "Portraits of His Children." If you want the entire compilation, you'll need to buy the paperback edition.

(If you want "Portraits of His Children" in a Kindle compilation, it's included in Dreamsongs: Volume II, which contains a total of 12 George R.R. Martin stories.)

As for the story itself: another reviewer here called it "not his best" and "average work," and I can't dispute that because it's the first of Martin's stories I've read. If "Portraits of His Children" is not Martin's best, then I can't wait to read his best. The story started out rather pedestrian in my opinion, but despite that, Martin's style of communication hooked me right away:

"'You liked me well enough when I was in your damn book, when you could control everything I did and said, right? Don't like it so well now that I'm real, though. That's your problem. You never did like real life half as well as you liked books.'"

"He wanted to tell a story about small people being ground down inexorably by time and age, about the inevitability of loneliness and defeat. He produced a novel as gray and brittle as newsprint. He was very proud of it."

Given Martin's unique style, the plot of this story wouldn't have mattered to me one bit. He could have written about a solitary old man who collects bottle caps, and I would have read it to the end.

But as the story unfolded, a very imaginative plot emerged. I don't want to give too much away, but the story has a Twilight Zone feel to it, and it involves a lonely author who loves the characters in his novels more than his own family - and who only realizes it when those characters visit him, and explain it to him.

I found the "portrait" theme itself interesting, once I'd finished reading the story. We learn at the beginning that the protagonist's real-life daughter has damaged her own self-portrait, and that revelation comes on the heels of the delivery of another portrait (this one of a character from one of the protagonist's own novels). Bits and pieces of the story are revealed, many in flashback form, until the story itself is like a completed portrait - and the reader is eventually allowed to see "the big picture."

SEMI-SPOILER ALERT: Regarding the subject of incest, which has been brought up in a couple of these Amazon reviews: there is no incest, implied or otherwise, in this story. There is a scene where the protagonist has sex with a female character from one of his novels, and she does call him Daddy, but that's because all the characters from his novels are his "children." This particular character is a tease, and she's calling the protagonist Daddy precisely because he objects to it.

The only other place where anyone could possibly think this story contains incest is in a flashback scene, where the protagonist sleeps (and only sleeps) with his grown daughter. She's a woman who has been severely injured, physically and psychologically, and the reader would have to be pretty jaded to think "I want to show you where it hurts" is referring to anything that would result in an incestuous encounter.

To recap: the Kindle edition is not the paperback compilation, and contains just the one story; the story deserves 5 stars for style and imagination; and the "implications of incest" mentioned by another reviewer are nonexistent.

Mr. Martin is easily becoming one of my favorite authors. I will admit that I had not read any of his works until the `Song of Fire and Ice' series was created. I figure you have to begin somewhere though. While reading this book, I found that he not only can sweep you off to other worlds with ease, but also make you teary eyed when reviewing just what his characters are going through and the strength and/or weakness that they reveal. It's a shame that this book isn't more popular. It truly is great. From a group of men playing with all their heart in the last super bowl (only to be replaced with a computer with no emotion to emulate them), to a group of old `friends' finally confronted with their failures and being told why exactly they came to be, you'll be surprised by just how much you'll be pulled into their lives. There are eleven stories all together, and I'd recommend each and every one of them. All run the gamut of emotions. All represent a different facet of our lives.

On a further note, I don't have a clue what the `Incest' guy was talking about. The story that is the namesake of the book has a scene where a father and daughter are laying together in bed consoling each other, I assume that he might have interpreted what happened incorrectly (or then again, perhaps I did).

The story "Unsound Variations" was just amazing! a single move in a chess tounament that one of the weaker players made ruins the lives of the rest of the team in ways both disturbing and unimaginable...

The "Ice Dragon" won an award and after reading it and wiping your tears away you will know why... its simply amazing how one man has so many stories that, in just a few pages can cut through a persons layers of bitterness and expose emotions that one may have believed to have been long since dead.
("With Morning comes Mistfall" and "Lonely Songs of Loren Dorr" fit into this category...Not to mention the Title story about a Daughters mystical Paintings...)

For you anarchists out there you will find the story "closing Time" has a pleasent way of dealing with the whole mess out there....

A total of 11 wonderous and magical stories affiriming that GRR Martin was the Master even before the Song of Ice and Fire was Created.

Buy this book! It will be [$$$], but its worth it if you want to laugh and cry again.