Dances with Dragons, t-minus ~ 1 month

So A Dance with Dragons, A Song of Ice and Fire #5, is coming out in about a month. Honestly I've been wondering if it really would drop (at ~1000 pages, it's literally going to be a heavy drop). Seems as if it's for real, Publisher's Weekly has a short review up (and Lev Grossman will be penning a positive review in Time soon). Overall from what I can glean it looks as if A Dance with Dragons will receive a straight-B grade. My own current plan is it to wait for the first assessments to come in on Amazon, and get the Kindle version if the star ratings remain above A Feast for Crows. It is strongly hinted in the Publisher's Weekly review that this is basically another "bridge" book, suggesting that George R. R. Martin still hasn't gotten the story under control yet. Nevertheless, it may be that we finally reach the threshold of the portion of Martin's epic which shifts from Dark Age historical thriller to magical high fantasy, a transition the author has promised, and which helped me convince Alan Jacobs to give the series a second look after being disappointed by the lack of fantastical elements early on. Martin's penchant for dark plot twists, and shades of gray in character and actions, certainly gave his work a level of verisimilitude which put it above and beyond other works of fantasy, but I'm honestly not too excited about a magicked-up version of the Book of Job. Whereas some fantasists use magic as a deus ex machina which transforms their narrative into farce in short order, at his point a little numinous wonder would do the characters of the A Song of Ice and Fire a world of good. Also, I still haven't see the Game of Thrones HBO series, but the incessant web-chatter about it certainly does remind me of A Song of Ice and Fire. I guess it's doing some good in terms of marketing Martin's brand.