A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire, #4)

by George R.R. Martin

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What a lengthy and seemingly pointless journey.

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A Game of Thrones was an entertaining one, A Clash of Wings made me want to cry from boredom and A Storm of Swords was the best of the three entertainment wise. So I assumed that A Feast for Crows would be just as awesome as it’s prequel, if not more, but that unfortunately never ends up happening. A Feast for Crows is a tediously long book about side character, doing mundane thing that literally don’t move the plot as forward as you’d hope in a book series supposedly ending in 7 books. That would have been fantastic if the characters ended up being 1. Interesting and 2. Actually achieving something, I personally wouldn’t mind an 800 page book about the founders of Hogwarts, but for A Song of Ice and Fire, it simply doesn’t work in the same regard for me.

I think the main reason for that is the amount of characters that gets introduced in any given scenario in this series, some are familiar, some are common but the biggest majority are new characters I’ll probably never see again, yet I’m supposed to care enough about them to end up recognizing them in case I see them again or see where they end up in this world. Long story short, I don’t. I dont have many favourites in this series despite the numbers, so a book like this is hard to get through for me. There were three povs that I cared about more than others in this book, but I didn’t actually feel the very end of the book where only them were in the loop. There was an interesting character in this book, but she wasn’t focused on all that much in it, just an instance.

I do get that Martin is trying to be as immersive as he possible can while including everyone and everything, but the fact that he doesn’t actually show anything being accomplished makes it a sore spot for me. I love journey books, I love learning about universes in High Fantasy if they’re great ones, but not like this. The saving grace of the book I guess is seeing a bigger focus on Cersei and Jaime alongside Brienne. Getting to see more about the former two’s state of minds if you will, feels somewhat overdue. Brienne on the other hand is one of the characters I don’t mind seeing more off, but I do wish she had more to her than what 90% of this book had her do, her last chapter was probably the one I enjoyed the most in the book because of how it proceeded and who was there.

I feel like I’m honestly going in circles here, because that mundanity is what makes this book feel as pointless as it did when it could’ve probably been a lot more rewarding. I thought after I’m done that there is a good reason for this sort of thing, so I looked for some note from the author and wow did Martin make it feel even more pointless in what he wrote which I’ll include below to avoid spoilers. At the end I believe that this was a very weak book, and I only hope that the sequel is better entertainment wise.

Final rating: 1.5/5