The Game of Thrones: First Chapters, First Impressions

My Home Town, Actually

I am familiar with this kind of book: its endpapers includes a map of the imagined land, it has characters with vaguely familiar but ultimately non-Earth names, and it uses language that lightly imitates the diction and structure of medieval English. Its familiarity is comforting, but I am hoping for more than a routine fantasy novel (there are so many of them).

I like the idea of a story set in winter, though, there again, the idea of a land cursed by an evil entity goes at least as far back as JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.