A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
No spoilers for my thoughts on this one. First, on a metapoint, I thought about holding off on a review until I had finished A Dance With Dragons, because this book doesn’t really come to a conclusion and focuses on an overlapping timeline with just a subset of the characters. I definitely missed a few of the narrators, because of that split, but I was glad to see more of the “bad” guys getting to tell their stories.
I don’t remember the exact publication dates, but Martin’s writing style has definitely evolved somewhat over the series. There were a few things I noticed. For a few of the narrating characters, instead of the chapter headings being their first name, they got some other identifier, which was an interesting touch. The other large difference was that a lot of the action was elsewhere, so we had a lot of events that weren’t directly experienced by the characters either being relayed to them in dialogue, or recently past events that they were thinking over. This can be bot an interesting style choice, and an annoyance, because you get weird verb tenses and don’t just see the action as it occurs. Obviously one of the factors here is that we had to know what other narrating characters who weren’t covered in this book were up to.
The ending to this book wasn’t as nicely wrapped up, I guess because of the two-parter effect. It also didn’t have the surprises that really shocked me near the end of Book 3. This is part of why I gave this book a slightly lower rating than the rest of the series – it felt mostly like filler leading to the big confrontations in the next book, instead of having a lot of interesting stuff on its own. That is, most of the characters were either alluding to events coming soon, or talking about events that had happened in Book 3, without making as much happen themselves.
It’s still a necessary read for the continuity of the series, but definitely not as impressive. I don’t know what kind of pressures Martin had from his publishers, but I think he would have been better off waiting to produce one large volume. I wonder how the hypothetical fourth season of the HBO series will handle it – I suspect they’ll interleave characters more, since they don’t want to not feature actors for an entire year.
