(Note: this is the 4th book in A Song of Ice and Fire, so if you don’t want the plot spoiled, I highly recommend you not read any more of this post, but instead go out and read A Game of Thrones.)
Martin’s sprawling epic has grown so long that he couldn’t even fit all the events and characters that were supposed to take place in this book into a volume that was capable of being published, so he took the controversial move to split the story in two, and only follow half of the characters. This book covers the main continent of Westeros, minus the North. The next book, which will come out this July, A Dance with Dragons, was delayed five years, and will follow our friends across the sea and at the Wall. This means that those who read A Storm of Swords when it was originally published have been waiting ten years for those characters to return!
Feast for Crows is the weakest in the series so far, due in part to the absence of our most interesting characters—Jon Snow, Tyrion, and Daenerys. Instead, we keep following Arya and Sansa, Jaime, and Samwell, but most of the chapters are told from new perspectives, some of characters we’ve met before, some new. The biggest shift is the focus on the houses of Greyjoy and Martell. The men of the Iron islands are choosing a new king after Balon Greyjoy’s death, and his daughter and two of his brothers are claiming the kingship. In the south, Doran Martell is hedging his bets carefully, but the Sand Snakes and his daughter Arianne are plotting a more aggressive course.
Unlike the other books, which start each chapter with the name of the character whose perspective we are following, here for some reason we get titles for some characters, like “The Soiled Knight,” but names for others. Even more confusing, the titles are not consistent for characters, so Victarion Greyjoy is “The Iron Commander” in one chapter, and “The Reaver” in the next. We also follow characters whose perspective only appears once, another new development. Traditionally Martin reserves the prologue for a one-shot character perspective (so, far, because that character dies each time).
Still, Feast for Crows is not a waste of time. It’s prone to some of the faults of middle books in a detailed and epic series, but we can see the threads and prophecies and tension continuing to build, which should make the payoff later worth it.
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