Talk Back

[galactic_dev]

For those of you who don't know, A Feast for Crows is Martin's long awaited 4th book in the series A Song of Ice and Fire (although like so many serieses, it is known best by the title of the first book, which in this case is A Game of Thrones).

Up until this book, I said that this book series was hands down the best fantasy reading I've ever done; better even than LOTR. But, I think any great art is a combination of talent and luck, and for this fourth book, I think the luck ran out.

This fourth installment was much delayed because the story got away from Martin, and the book got so huge that he decided to chop it in half, so this book gives us 700 pages on approximately half of the major characters of the series.

Unfortunately, that really made this book not nearly as good. But I think the real problem was Martin's failure to make some hard choices about which characters to write about and for how long to write about them.

What makes things worse is that this book didn't cover my favorite characters, forcing me to wait until the 5th book comes out. And even then, I can't hope for much resolution until volume 6, which I can only pray will be the last volume, because the story has been spiralling away from Martin and he needs to reel some of it in.

That said, although it was a disappointment compared to the first 3 books, I did finish it relatively quickly (700 pages), and y'all know that I just will not finish a bad book. So if I'm reviewing it at all, it couldn't have been that bad.

[shaw]

I want to reread the first three before getting to it. I'm afraid it has been long enough that I won't remember who anybody is.

And it will be fun to reread the tournament scene in book 1 again, now that I KNOW who these people are.