I probably would have liked the fourth installment more had there been more chapters on Araya. Of the four I have read from the Song of Ice and Fire series, this one dragged the most. Still, a good read (if you like fantasy)! ( )

Wow, finally finished this volume. I can't believe I devoured some of the others in about a week, but this one took me a whole month.

Basically a lot of mostly nothing happens as characters sort of flail about following the carnage in the past two books. Brienne walks around looking for Sansa all over the place and not finding her... Cersei hangs out and be's evil... Sansa pretends to be Alayne and Littlefinger appears to actually be helping her(??)... Arya hangs around Braavos and smells like fish... Jaime hates Cersei and takes Riverrun bloodlessly... Arianne's plot fails, she's imprisoned, and she actually finds out something cool... Euron Greyjoy becomes King of the Iron Islands, to everyone's dismay... Sam Tarly makes it to Oldtown, but Maester Aemon dies on the way...

So I guess some stuff does happen, but it happens awfully slowly. I just hope Cersei gets her head taken off soon, because it's been a long time coming. I also hope that Brienne is somehow still alive and doesn't have to kill Jaime. When Zombie Catelyn's men stuck that rope around Brienne's neck and tightened it up, I almost had another "throw-the-book-against-the-wall" moment... if Martin truly kills her, it will have been a waste of several hundred pages of reading time from her wandering around uselessly for most of the book...

Still have to give it three stars, though. An author who can keep track of this many characters and start pulling some more threads together is pretty impressive, even if the book was slow and meandering. ( )

The fourth book of the Song of Ice and Fire series disappointed many, and left readers holding their breath for so long, some may have perished waiting. Many fan-favorite characters do not even appear in Feast. In Martin's words:

"I felt that readers would be better served by a book that told all the story for half the characters, rather than half the story for all the characters." - George R.R. Martin

This probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but the book suffers for it. Indeed, it is the fourth-best book of the series; that's not to say that A Feast for Crows is not a good book--it most certainly is--just that it's not the best of the series.

This book starts out slowly, introducing new viewpoint characters that are interesting, but tedious. In fact, A Feast for Crows relies heavily on new characters and the viewpoints of characters we've only had short introductions to in past books, or have been mentioned in passing only. The Ironmen are heavily represented in Feast, though by the end of the novel, it's unclear why so much time was spent with them.

Events start so slowly, in fact, it takes seven chapters to bring readers around to a Stark. It jumps right into the aftermath of events in A Storm of Swords with Cersei being awoken and told of Tywin Lannister's death. Readers are allowed to see events from Cersei's point-of-view for the first time in the saga, and it's immediately obvious how deranged this character is. She has easily become the most reviled character in the saga for readers--even more so than in the previous novels.

Throughout Feast, Arya and Sansa both appear, though Sansa has only three chapters, in which she really has no import to events. Littlefinger only appears once--briefly--though his scheming is in full effect, and makes one wonder what he has up his sleeve this time. Clearly, Peter Baelish has an end-game in mind, but it's still unclear just what his agenda is.

Much time is spent in Dorne, delving into the politics of that far-away region of Westeros, and though intriguing, it again feels like an unnecessary step away from the main events occurring. Since the Ice and Fire saga is at heart a story of political intrigue, perhaps it shouldn't be frowned upon quite so much.

Arya's chapters, though brief, are quite good, and she continues to be a character that both rewards readers, and encourages sympathy for this girl. She has undergone the longest and most arduous journey of any character in the story so far, short of perhaps Daenerys.

Near the end of the book, events do take a turn toward the unexpected, but not in an unrewarding way. Indeed, it was hard not to smile at the fate certain characters are forced to face. Without revealing too much, it's safe to say that there are plenty of deaths in the novel, none of them are particularly significant, especially after those that occurred in A Storm of Swords.

It's hard to draw a full conclusion about A Feast for Crows, due to it only being half the story; however, this is the book given to readers, so it must be reviewed as it stands. It's a dreadfully dark and bleak book, and the weather turns more toward rain than anything else, helping to dull the bright vivid colors of the imagination while reading. Sadly, the theme of the series is 'Winter is Coming', but it's not truly evident in Feast, since the book takes place primarily in the warmer climates of Westeros. We see the Wall only briefly, and then nothing about that portion of the world is discussed again during the novel, due to the split of the characters. Perhaps, rather than split the story geographically--as Martin has done in Feast--he could have separated the characters more evenly, and provided a story that might have interested readers a bit more.

As it stands, A Feast for Crows is still a highly-entertaining novel, and will keep the pages turning (especially the second-half), though a mildly disappointing chapter in the Ice and Fire saga. After three magnificent novels to date, Feast fails to meet the same level of mastery as the previous books.

It also needs to be mentioned that at the end of Feast, the author predicts that the next half of the story, contained in A Dance with Dragons should be out within a year. That prediction not only turned out to be wildly inaccurate (it took six years for the next novel to arrive), but also created a huge backlash for the author.

Once A Dance with Dragons completes the story begun in A Feast for Crows, it may make this book better, but as it stands right now, A Feast for Crows feels incomplete. ( )

Wow. I am stunned at how much worse this book is than its predecessors. After the tremendous plot from the first three novels, the action here grinds to a halt. Worse than that, the storytelling technique is so different from before, so tedious. Most of the novel feels only like introspection, and much of the introspection is repetitive. I know that part of what I liked so well earlier in the series was the attention paid to each character, but that just doesn't work here. Earlier, we'd see great detail as characters would grow and change, but here, they are static, even stagnant. There isn't a character at the end of the novel who is substantially different from his/her portrayal at the start. In addition, Martin adds many new characters to the mix--new characters who don't seem to do much of anything. Sure, there are a few who shake things up, but most of the newcomers seem so trivial. They do little to impact the plot, nor do they provide a unique perspective. They are not a fresh voice; in fact, they don't even seem too different from the other characters or from each other Instead, they bog down the story and distract from the parts that are well-written. The introspection all seems to blur together, and many times, when returning to a character, Martin just repeats much of what the character was feeling in the last chapter. (In case I fell asleep, I guess, so I can know I didn't miss anything.)

The writing disappoints on many different levels. Unlike previous books, some of the chapters don't begin with a character's name. Instead, they have titles like "The Soiled Knight" or "The Princess in the Tower," which is confusing and gets old fast. There are many dangling threads, and there are so many cliffhangers and fakeouts that I want to scream. While the last book stopped characters' story arcs at a satisfying point, this book just throws characters into dangerous situations and leaves them there. Worse, so often the writing is so vague that I don't actually know what this imminent danger even is. (Some characters may have died! Or not! Or soon will, maybe! Do I even care, at this point?)

This book ends at under a thousand pages, which is more than a hundred less than book 3, but it feels three times as long. I am floored that someone could write a 900 page novel in which nothing happens. Ironically, there are some exciting events that, I'm sure, would deeply impact the characters who endure them, but these events happen offscreen, as it were. A character (say Sam, for example) will have a chapter of introspection, disappear for a hundred pages, and reappear for another chapter of vague speculations about the future or fond recollections of another character that we've already read about. By the way, a couple of exciting life-changing events have happened to him in the time between his chapters when we weren't following his story, but we will only learn about these things in passing, and the look into his thoughts will focus more on abstract themes than on any personal development.

The heart of the story still follows the same characters from the earlier novels, and half of those characters won't appear in this book at all. I know that Martin intends this book to cover the same time frame as book 5, which will leave these characters alone and tell the stories for the ones who are missing here. This leaves the reader with half a story, which is just exactly what it feels like. ( )

I almost gave this 3 stars, but the last 200-300 pages redeemed the earlier parts of the book. To be fair, it is hard to follow up from the previous novel due to some fairly big events and deaths. This novel dragged on quite a bit and part of what was hard for me was reading about these new people and places that I didn't really know or care about. It became clearer later on why this was happening, but as an author I feel like there should be more hints and less wordiness. Overall, a great installment in the series. I had some issues with it, namely how long GRR Martin took to get to the point, but I can understand that this is essentially building up larger events further in the storyline. ( )