I read this book because I'm in a phase of reading everything I can get my hands on that's related to Game of Thrones, and it was a bit of a letdown. I probably should have expected it since it's essentially an encyclopedia of the world, but I was hoping for more interesting information than I got. The first half of the book definitely had exciting stuff - I loved learning more about the children of the forest, the First Men, and the Andals conquest - and diving deeper into the history of each Westeros family was fascinating (even if the Targaryen section repeated a lot of Fire & Blood, sometimes seemingly copying whole sections). Once we got out of Westeros, I found it less interesting, perhaps because we have so little context for the other parts of the GOT world and it felt very fanciful and detached from anything (and I didn't know how to feel about some of the seemingly racist depictions of other cultures). The illustrations were gorgeous, though, and I'm excited to keep reading the original GOT series.