A Feast for Crows

This has been a pretty good series so far, so when Suzy got me the next in line for Christmas I was pleasantly surprised. A Feast for Crows is the fourth in the 'A Song of Ice and Fire' series written by George R.R. Martin. One thing that I have particularly enjoyed about this author is his penchant for knocking off characters. I am paraphrasing poorly, but when Joss Whedon said that if no one dies it doesn't mean anything that really struck a cord with me. Martin may be taking that tenet to its extreme as the characters who started the series and are still alive are few and far between.

The series is a fantasy one, but not over the top about it. Very little occurs that is 'un-natural'. 99% of the story could easily have taken place in human kind's past. With the occasional dragon sighting thrown it for good measure. The basic premise is that the king has died, and there are doubts about the succession. These doubts lead to many vying for the throne, or a piece of it, and what results is what you would expect, death, chaos and misery. Martin does a good job with his character development, they are generally complex, the 'bad' ones generally have some good, the 'good' ones have some bad. I found myself feeling not quite affection, but not certainly not hatred, towards some rather unsavory characters. One other point about the characters, there are so many that are developed over the course of the series that he can hop around from one character's perspective (which is how he tells the story) to another without even touching on some for the whole book. Some characters which had fairly major roles in previous installments of the series have barely been touched in the first four hundred or so pages of this one.

If you like fantasy, and don't mind long series with pretty adult subject matter at times, this is a good series, and so far I have definitely enjoyed A Feast of Crows. I am looking forward to learning how well and upon what the crows continue to feast.