Long awaited, and oft delayed, this book was setting itself up for disappointment. Happily though, while its not as good or as concentrated as the previous books, it is still an excellent addition to the series. It does, however, leaves asking for more, and book 5 seems to be a very long way off. ( )

George Martin must have some exceptional gifts to induce readers to stick with this story through 4 books. He writes well. Indeed, his descriptions of battles are frequently gripping, and he imagines beautiful intrigues with complex characters who frequently surprise you.

But this book is simply not a very good story. The whole series is heavily overwritten, and it seems that this caused a problem for the author in writing this book - such that he then simply jettisoned the points of view of half the characters. Unfortunately it was largely the most interesting storylines that were jettisoned, and we were thus treated with hundred upon hundreds of pages of ... nothing very much. At the end of this book I cannot think what intrigue has really been advanced, nor what stories have been concluded. It feels like one of those American TV shows that spans 10 series and here is series 7 which does nothing but sow confusion and fill air time.

The faults of this series remain. It is set in a faux medieval world with all the derivative elements such as knights and jousts and carousing and such like. Terms like "Ser" instead of "sir" and "your grace" instead of "your majesty" don't create a sense of difference as they are so close to the classical terms. The one innovation - the seasons that span many years - is entirely irrelevent in this book, and having read this deep into the series, there really is nothing particularly magical about the land. What is more, the characters all seem to speak with the same voice - and I am peculiarly fed up with "half a hundred" and all the other "half a ..." that are charactersitic of the author's idiolect. Don't the people of Westeros have a word for "fifty" (although that admittedly would require just one word rather than three)?

This is the weakest book of the series thus far, and the most heavily overwritten. It is not entirely without merit (see my opening paragraph), but it is becoming increasingly difficult to recommend this series. ( )

http://www.piruett.se/2009/03/26/allt...
http://www.piruett.se/2009/03/27/lite... ( )

Summary: A continuation of the epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. Now that King Joffrey is dead, his mother Cersei has taken over as regent but her reign only brings more unrest as the Seven Kingdoms are splintered further and characters fight for survival and victory.

Review: George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is an established favourite with me, so unless there is some massive upheaval like the kind that happen in the plot, I’m going to like it, nay, love it. A Feast for Crows continues the tradition of Martin’s brutal, realistic, gloriously vast imagination. His world isn’t safe — you can’t expect favourite characters to survive and you can’t expect happy endings — but that’s what makes reading him so satisfying. You may rage at his decisions (say the Hound isn’t dead. Say it isn’t so!), but you respect his willingness to take risks and present people in all their flawed complications. This is epic fantasy at its deepest and most human. This is what I would give to people who scoff at the genre.

A Feast for Crows is actually only half a book. It contains about half of the cast’s stories; Martin says in a note that originally it was meant to include all, but then it grew so large that he was forced to split the story in two. As such, A Feast for Crows isn’t quite as good as its predecessors because it always feels like half a story. Certainly its half includes some of my most-liked characters such as Sansa and Brienne, and I loved the venture into Dorne and the Martells, as well as the politics of the Greyjoy family, but it’s not the whole picture and sometimes I felt that loss.

Yet it’s still a fantastic book on its own. It opens a lot of doors for the rest of the series by continuing the stories of characters we’ve known, loved, or hated from the first three books, but it also introduces new characters to flesh out the struggle on all its sides.

Conclusion: Not the best in the series because it always feels incomplete, but come on. It’s A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s like preferring one van Gogh to another. In the end they’re all worthy of praise. ( )

What more can I say? Love these books. ( )