• A Feast With Dragons

THE BOOK BEHIND THE FOURTH SEASON OF THE ACCLAIMED HBO SERIES GAME OF THRONESFew books have captivated the imagination and won the devotion and praise of readers and critics everywhere as has George R. Martin’s monumental epic cycle of high fantasy. Now, in A Feast for Crows, Martin delivers the long-awaited fourth book of his landmark series, as a kingdom torn asunder finds itself at last on the brink of peace. Only to be launched on an even more terrifying course of destruction.A FEAST FOR CROWSIt seems too good to be true.

After centuries of bitter strife and fatal treachery, the seven powers dividing the land have decimated one another into an uneasy truce. Or so it appears. With the death of the monstrous King Joffrey, Cersei is ruling as regent in King’s Landing. Robb Stark’s demise has broken the back of the Northern rebels, and his siblings are scattered throughout the kingdom like seeds on barren soil. Few legitimate claims to the once desperately sought Iron Throne still exist—or they are held in hands too weak or too distant to wield them effectively. The war, which raged out of control for so long, has burned itself out.But as in the aftermath of any climactic struggle, it is not long before the survivors, outlaws, renegades, and carrion eaters start to gather, picking over the bones of the dead and fighting for the spoils of the soon-to-be dead. Now in the Seven Kingdoms, as the human crows assemble over a banquet of ashes, daring new plots and dangerous new alliances are formed, while surprising faces—some familiar, others only just appearing—are seen emerging from an ominous twilight of past struggles and chaos to take up the challenges ahead.It is a time when the wise and the ambitious, the deceitful and the strong will acquire the skills, the power, and the magic to survive the stark and terrible times that lie before them.

It is a time for nobles and commoners, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and sages to come together and stake their fortunes. And their lives. For at a feast for crows, many are the guests—but only a few are the survivors.; November 2005.

A Feast With Dragons

ISBN: 323. Read online, or download in secure ePub format. Title: A Feast for Crows.Series:(No.

4). Author: George R. Martin.Imprint: Bantam.

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Background:For those not familiar, unlike the first three books of George R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, books four and five, A Feast for Crows ( AFFC) and A Dance with Dragons ( ADWD), largely overlap chronologically. Here is a bit of background on how that arrangement came about, courtesy of Sean T. Collins of boiledleather.com:George R.R. Martin famously took years to finish Feast after Storm came out, and infamously took even more years to finish Dance after Feast came out. As we know, this came down to several problems.

First, he’d intended to have a five-year jump in the narrative following the conclusion of Storm, but after about a year of writing he realized it wasn’t working and had to start over. Then, once he’d started over, he discovered that while the five-year jump didn’t work for most of the storylines, it worked really well for a few, and it was hard to get them right without it. Then he realized that he had way too many characters and way too much story to fit in one volume as planned, and he needed to decide how to split one volume into two – should he tell half the story for all the characters, or (nearly) all the story for half the characters? (He chose the latter solution.)After I finished A Storm of Swords (book 3), I was disappointed to find that many of my favorite characters were not present in AFFC. (spoiler if you haven't read book 3), which explained that nearly a quarter of the book is occupied by one particular character I detest, set me over the edge and I didn't attempt to read AFFC for some time.Eventually, I stumbled upon. This reading order is designed to strike the right balance between maintaining chronology and not ruining surprises.My thoughts:As a new reader, I was concerned that I would miss out on surprises by having them revealed in chapters from the other book. Fortunately, I can't recall a single instance where this happened.

The few modifications made by Mr. Collins to the strict chronological order weren't at all noticeable. In fact, I felt some shockers were actually enhanced by tighter chronology, since I got to see whether what I learned in a chapter from one book was actually true in another (e.g.One negative impression I had was that early on, this combined book was a slog. There were quite a few chapters where I found myself thinking, 'Was this chapter even necessary?' , or at least, 'Cut to the chase!'

However, I think that's more a result of the fact that neither AFFC or ADWD are particularly eventful until at least the halfway point. In the early chapters, you can definitely see GRRM setting up the cyvasse pieces for action later on in the story. Yet, when there's twice as many of these to get through, it definitely feels like the story is slow to develop.Another issue was the fact that, given the sheer number of characters present in the combined book, there can be a considerable number of chapters before you return to a given character. This could have made it difficult to remember what was going on in their previous chapter. However, I found this to be not that big of an issue. GRRM is very good about reminding you throughout a chapter where you left off in the previous chapter. Only a couple of times in this 2,200+ page mammoth did I have to really stop and think about what had happened previously, and I never once felt the need to go back and re-read a prior chapter.Finally, there's one bit of dialogue that's repeated in two different chapters.

It occurs when two characters, one with a chapter in AFFC and the other in ADWD, discuss something, and in back-to-back chapters you get the conversation twice. As I was reading the second chapter's iteration of this dialogue, I wondered why the chapter wasn't simply removed, but I soon realized it has bit of a twist at the end the other one doesn't, so it needed to stay. Other than that, I can think of no examples where it was clear the chapters were from two different books or were covering the same ground twice.ConclusionOverall, I found that this order combined the two books about as seamlessly as one could hope.

I really enjoyed getting to know what was happening on the other side of the world as the story progressed, rather than having to wait until I finished an entire book. All of the suspense is still there, you just don't have to wait as long to find out 'what happened'. The plot flowed very well, especially as both books started to pick up steam later on.Would I recommend this combined-order version for other new readers? The more I think about it, the more I would rather have had Martin stick to his original plan and just jump forward some number of years, filling us in on the backstory as appropriate. These last two books deflated all of the momentum and interest for me, since they functioned largely to send characters to interesting places and situations but never actually get them there.

It felt like I was being strung along, not only in terms of extra book sales, but in that Martin had trained me to expect a certain amount of stuff happening per book, and it wasn't in there. I'm fine with waiting years between books if they're as good as the first three, but if you're just going to stick Tyrion on a boat for a thousand pages, don't expect me to keep up my enthusiasm for another six years until the next book is released.