A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin (2.5 stars)

Wow, what a let down. After finishing A Storm of Swords I immediately began this one, which is a luxury real fans wouldn't have had since there was a five year wait in-between. Martin made a decision to cut the too-long fourth book in half, not chronologically, but geographically, so in A Feast for Crows he gives us all the boring characters bumping around for 1000 pages with nothing interesting happening.

In fact, here is a summary of the entire book:

• Cersei ad nauseum. Making one stupid decision after another in Kings Landing. Not interesting stupid, just boring, incompetent stupid.
• Brienne on a completely pointless quest for Sansa, never coming within 1000 miles of her. Her story ends on a lame made-for-tv cliffhanger.
• Jaime mopes around wishing he had two hands and being mad at Cersei. He starts training with his left hand but doesn't get any good.
  
• Sam is on a boat. There's a storm. He gets laid. He also apparently can't tell one baby from another since Aemon has to tell him about the baby swap.
• Sansa continues her compliant relationship in the Eyrie with Petyr and his creepy mother-daughter fetish. Their trip down the mountain is described in such intricate detail I was sure Sansa was going to crack it and push Robert off the edge (I wanted to), but instead, surprise! Nothing happens.
• Arya picks up what promised to be an awesome new training montage with the Faceless men, but, amazingly, it also turns out to be boring.
• Arianne of Dorne has a gutsy plan to start a war. It doesn't work.
• A bunch of minor characters you don't care about get their own one-off point of view chapter to do something that is of minor importance to the story.

The tragedy of this book is that it is brilliantly written, and could have been amazing if there had been some significant plot developments. Sure the iron men needed a new king, and the church's rise to power was important to the story, but those points and more could have been covered in a lot less than 1000 pages. I initially hated the chapters about the ironborn, since it was a bunch of new characters I didn't care about. However, I was won over to some extent by Aeron Damphair's character and his drowned men, literally drowned and resuscitated, and I hope we see him again in the story. My favourite quote from this part of the book was from Lord Rodrik 'The Reader':

"Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?" "How else? Though not till I'm done reading."

Looking back over the rest of my notes, they were all complaining about stuff so I'll skip listing them all here and leave with one final whinge. In the first couple of books I loved the use of 'much and more', but it has been so overused I'd now give much and more to never read it again.

2.5 stars