A Feast for CrowsGeorge R.R. Martin
684 pages
Bantam Spectra, 2005
Ah ha! Another 684 pages down in George R.R. Martin’s epic A Song of Ice and Fire. Once again I thoroughly enjoyed the read, but man, Martin is piling cliff-hanger on to cliff-hanger with this book. Chapters that end with, “When she woke the next morning, she was blind,” and “She screamed a word,” really left me wanting more. These were the final sentences we got to see from two of the twelve main POV characters that Martin uses in this installment. I understand that it is only half the book he intended it to be, but damn. Martin continues with the storytelling device of having several different main characters and telling the story through their various points of view. This time he confuses the issue by having some chapter titles be a character’s proper name, such as “Brienne,” and titles which indicate the character’s place in the story, such as “The Drowned Man” or “The Queenmaker.” Adding to all this, some of the characters have different chapter titles for their chapters. For instance the chapters titled “The Prophet” and “The Drowned Man” have the same main POV character. As I said in my review of A Storm of Swords, Martin manages to pull off using so many different characters with a certain élan which makes the novel eminently readable, although if you are not a died in the wool fantasy fan I would steer clear. Once again Martin has left me hungry for more, and I pray that the follow up novel A Dance with Dragons, which sounds suspiciously like an Anne McCaffery novel, is not too far off.
Next up: Wow, I need a break from all this serious reading so it is either going to be Steven Pressfield’s Last of the Amazons or David Gerrold’s The Galactic Whirlpool.
1 comment:
I enjoyed the writing very much, as I expected. But I think the book had structural issues. It probably would have been better as a series of short stories. And it felt a lot like a long drawn-out beginning. Which would be fine if the next book builds on it, but from what I hear, DWD is going to be more about the characters you didn't see in this book -- probably a long drawn out beginning for those characters. The series as a whole still rocks. But I look at FFC as sort of an episode of a plot-driven miniseries I think. It's really best when seen as part of the whole.
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