Author: George R.R. Martin
Publisher: Voyager (UK)/Bantam (US)
Genre: Fantasy
He was not wrong.
A Dance With Dragons is the 5th volume of the pants-shittingly popular A Song of Ice & Fire epic saga by George R.R. Martin that took something like 100 years to write. Unlike most serials, this big-ass manuscript does not immediately pick up where its predecessor A Feast for Crows left off. Rather, it changes the focus from the political theater of King’s Landing to areas more abroad: The Wall, The Eastern Kingdoms or Whatever, even some time is spent out on the open seas in addition to a stay at Winterfell as we follow the fates of characters we know and love.
I personally wasn’t a huge fan of the decision to essentially cut A Feast for Crows in two. I could certainly appreciate the focus the former ended up having, but the distance between events of that book and this one are so vast that I couldn’t remember what happened and couldn’t be bothered to care. I mean, Favorite_Person_15 is standing face to face with Arch_Villain_11, they’re about to eviscerate each other, but wait here’s what’s going on in fucking Dorne. Dorne’s INTEGRAL to this whole thing! That’s why I waited till book 3 to mention those guys! Fucking Dorne. And don’t get me started on the Greyjoys. >=(
An incredible lack of balance drives A Dance With Dragons in ways that I can barely express, but one might be able to argue that it’s a staple of the series by now; and that argument is fucking weak. We’ll get to see what happens to some guy in chapter 2, get a huge boner or ladyboner from the cliff-hanger, then not see the aftermath of that event until chapter 32, sometimes bravely exposited in a flashback sequence. Meanwhile, we spend a lot of time with characters who start out fairly charming that become grating and annoying as they wallow in their own self-pity for 30 pages when something cool finally happens. The devil is in the details I guess but by this point we should be moving at a pretty brisk pace, no?
The end quarter of the novel is by far the funnest part. Finally, things are starting to move again. When GRRM focuses, he really knows how to build that suspense that can make you cheer or cry. For all of its faults, A Song of Ice and Fire is still a very well executed story that will play on your emotions from beginning to end, despite all its Stop & Go.
ThomFiles 
February 10th, 2013 at 2:30 pm
Feast for Crows annoyed me to no end. My favorite characters? no where to be seen. Plot lines I was interested in? nope, not gonna talk about that either. Bah, who cares about Winterfell, when you can have warmer action down in Dorne? blah, whatev. I’ll wait till he finishes the series before I read further. apparently at some Con, someone had the balls to ask Martin who was going to finish the series if he dies before finishing it.
February 10th, 2013 at 2:43 pm
I’d agree that Feast was a low point in the series. It would’ve been easier to accept if Dorne was involved from the get-go. And questions of Martin’s health don’t surprise me, I think he stated somewhere that he didn’t want to follow Robert Jordan’s precedent. Time will tell on that one, but at least the Game of Thrones producers know how it all is going to end so they can wrap that series as long as HBO keeps giving them money.