A Feast for Crows

Masterfully plotted & written. Maybe not for you if you have no patience or thoughtfulness.

i ordered a mass market paperback in good, and it was surprisingly almost brand new!!

It's true, this novel is slow paced...is almost all intrigues and movements of players we have previously gotten little information on. To me it's all fascinating. For me, Martin has earned the right to a set-up book. I would never advocate this much preparation for an introduction to a series. A book should start off with a bang, I think, but in-spite of Martin's low-key approach to this chapter, he has created such a rich world, such an intricate political tapestry that I was never bored. The ending definitely kicks into old form though, and I won't say there isn't a contrast between stories...only that this one is still worth 5 stars, and will fit significantly into the whole. I also like the split. I like the shadows cast by the characters that we've previously read about, upon the Westeros landscape, as they all take on legendary significance. But Martin's story is bigger than any character, as we've all known for some time, and this book proves this further, by introducing a new cast of viewpoints that are all very interesting and all feel very relevent in the movement towards whatever it is that may yet come.

I'll start out by saying that I couldn't wait for it to come out and bought the UK edition and got it on Oct 18th and then sped my way through it in a few days. The general reader complaint with the book of course is the omitted POV chapters. However, had you been following along at George R.R. Martin's website you would have know that the book is really half a book as a result of publisher pressure and their reluctance to produce an 1000+ (possibly closer to 2000) page book (the bottom line rearing its ugly head). Mr. Martin would have preferred to make it a single book, but what resulted is a good compromise of full character arcs for half the "cast". Some have complained about the lack of chapters for Arya and Sansa, but quite frankly it makes a good deal of sense. Both characters are in situations where there is little going on that they can alter given that they are still children and are both students, learning their craft from their respective mentors while maturing towards adulthood. That is when they will be able to really make a difference in the world. More than anything, time has to pass for them to do this and extra prose would just take away from that goal. A Dance of Dragons which will contain more Arya and give us back Danerys, Tyrion, Jon, Bran, etc is essentially the other half of the book and will tie things together and move us into the future and a bit too. At the very least DOD will be a longer book than this volume, probably somewhere between ACOK and ASOS so we'll at least have something meaty to read (and reread while we wait for book 6) It does not look like books 6 and 7 though will be cut in half the same way 4 and 5 will be as the compromise does do a bit to reduce the richness of the overall story. What would be nice is after Dance of Dragons comes out is a timeline of the plot. Thus readers could go back and read book 4 and 5 together in the chronological order as originally intended. (Then I think we will have a 5-star book). As for the writing style, nothing has deteriorated in terms of Mr. Martin's approach and the quality. It is still excellent and the quality of his prose remains consistently good. The characters all have wonderful depth, all having their particular strengths and flaws giving them a richness that makes them feel like real people (I think we all know someone like Cersei who thinks she is smarter than everyone around her and gets in well over her head, relatively speaking of course) and not the same old tiresome archetypes and clichéd protagonists and antagonists of other series. The plot, logically so, has slowed down a bit. A Storm of Swords was a book where major changes occurred for some of the major players in this world and those characters that remain must now rebuild their power bases and their lives, which as in real life, tends to happen at an incremental pace. I highly recommend all current readers to stick with it and keep the faith. New readers go grab a Game of Thro

I'll start out by saying that I couldn't wait for it to come out and bought the UK edition and got it on Oct 18th and then sped my way through it in a few days. The general reader complaint with the book of course is the omitted POV chapters. However, had you been following along at George R.R. Martin's website you would have know that the book is really half a book as a result of publisher pressure and their reluctance to produce an 1000+ (possibly closer to 2000) page book (the bottom line rearing its ugly head). Mr. Martin would have preferred to make it a single book, but what resulted is a good compromise of full character arcs for half the "cast". Some have complained about the lack of chapters for Arya and Sansa, but quite frankly it makes a good deal of sense. Both characters are in situations where there is little going on that they can alter given that they are still children and are both students, learning their craft from their respective mentors while maturing towards adulthood. That is when they will be able to really make a difference in the world. More than anything, time has to pass for them to do this and extra prose would just take away from that goal. A Dance of Dragons (already more than halfway done and should have it out to us by early 2007 at latest) which will contain more Arya and give us back Danerys, Tyrion, Jon, Bran, etc is essentially the other half of the book and will tie things together and move us into the future. Hopefully books 6 and 7 though are not cut in half the same way 4 and 5 will be as the compromise does do a bit to reduce the richness of the overall story. What would be nice is after Dance of Dragons comes out is a timeline of the plot. Thus readers could go back and read book 4 and 5 together in the chronological order as originally intended. (Then I think we will have a 5-star book). As for the writing style, nothing has deteriorated in terms of Mr. Martin's approach and the quality. It is still excellent and the quality of his prose remains consistently good. The characters all have wonderful depth, all having their particular strengths and flaws giving them a richness that makes them feel like real people (I think we all know someone like Cersei who thinks she is smarter than everyone around her and gets in well over her head, relatively speaking of course) and not the same old tiresome archetypes and clichéd protagonists and antagonists of other series. The plot, logically so, has slowed down a bit. A Storm of Swords was a book where major changes occurred for some of the major players in this world and those characters that remain must now rebuild their power bases and their lives, which as in real life, tends to happen at an incremental pace. I highly recommend all current readers to stick with it and keep the faith. New readers go grab a Game of Thrones. Addendum: This was not intended to be a 5-star review on par with the first 3 books. I wanted to give it a 4-star based o