Book 30 of 2013: A Feast For Crows by George R.R. Martin

A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin is the fourth book in the Song of Ice and Fire series. It picks up after the second part of A Storm of Swords and kind of overlaps some of the events in that book. It's been a little while since I read this one so I'm trying to remember exactly what happened in it. Basically Cersei is in control at King's Landing as the War of Five Kings comes to an end and she's getting wilder and wilder. Brienne is still trying to find Sansa and everything is pretty much carrying on from where it left off.

 

At 865 pages it's a bit of a mammoth of a book and probably my least favourite of the series so far. Since the Kindle 'box set' of these books has a fault meaning it cannot tell you what page you're on, I had to rely on the Wiki which lists all the chapters. It seemed to take ages to hit the halfway mark of the book and I was disappointed by how it seemed to drag. Normally I use the Wiki to check how long it is until my next favourite character; this time I was using it to see how close to the end I was. Though one I was halfway through I did seem to speed up a bit and enjoy it more.

I think a large part of the reason why I struggled more with this book is because it introduces the perspectives of several new characters, specifically those in Dorne. The problem is there are so many characters that I already care about and I want to know about that I didn't really feel too concerned about these new people I was meeting.

I really missed Tyrion and Daenarys in this book and I would've liked to see more of Sansa and Arya. It's funny too think that I used to dread Sansa's chapters and now I'm morning her lack of them. Perhaps that means that I might come to look forward to the chapters of these new characters in future books.

It also felt like a lot of this book was about Cersei. I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing though. She's an interesting character and so far most of what we've seen of her has been filtered through other characters.

I'm beginning to find it a bit tricky to keep track of all the different conflicts now. Basically everyone is at war with everyone else!

I guess that if this is to be a seven book series then technically we're at the halfway point so it's only to be expected that things might start to get a bit confused. I'm just hoping that the next books can bring some resolution to some of these conflicts and perhaps few new characters so there's more time for the ones I do want to see.