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.
