A Feast for Crows: The Weakest Link

No Tyrion, no John Snow and no Danerys. Boo-urns on all that.

Without the most compelling characters in the Song of Ice and Fire series, A Feast for Crows falls flat, and underwhelms after the intensity of A Storm of Swords.

Most of the characters in Crows are minor, and even the main cast is just…well, floundering about. Nothing too terribly interesting happens to Arya in this installment, Samwell spends most of his time on a boat, Brienne wanders around hopelessly looking for Sansa and Jaime goes to Riverrun. Ummmm. OK.

Probably knowing that Crows was not going to live up to the expectations that nearly everyone had after reading A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin does provide some bombshells toward the end, including an interesting new truth about Dornish loyalties, Brienne’s sad but faithful end and a bad turn of fate for Queen Cersei.

In fact, without the Cersei chapters, Feast would have been a total waste of time. Well, maybe not total, as the content in this book is setup so you have context for the good stuff that’s supposed to go down in A Dance with Dragons. But Cersei definitely does save this book from being only mildly interesting, and makes it much better.

So, what’s Cersei’s deal? As a narrator, you learn that Cersei is every bit as awful as the other characters would have had us believe all along. She’s been relentlessly plotting and scheming since Game of Thrones, but she’s always had her brothers Jaime and Tyrion and her father Tywin to serve as backstops, keeping her out of hot water when her plots go awry. But Jaime’s fed up with Cersei now that he’s grown a conscience and learned that some of her betrayals were at his expense, and her father is dead. It was only a matter of time before her duplicity bit her in the ass.

Cersei careens from one awful miscalculation to the next. She’s completely paranoid, seeing machinations everywhere. And she’s incredibly self-congratulatory and believes her counter-plots are outsmarting everyone. But the reality is that she’s not as shrewd as she believes herself to be, and she ends up making enemies rather than elevating herself to unquestioned power. In quick succession, Cersei totally screws up Kings Landing and the Lannisters' hold on it, appointing a pathetic counsel to serve as King Tommen’s advisors, stirring up feuds within her own family, turning to shady and dishonest people to form her inner circle and creating a new army of religious zealots not answerable to the Iron Throne. All of which plant the seeds of her own doom.

So, there was that.

Bottom line is that it’s been pretty well documented what happened in the creative process to create both Feast and Dragons – the number of characters and the enormity of the events in Westeros got too big and too complicated, requiring a single book to be split in two. And Feast is basically all the less interesting chapters of Dragons, made into a stand-alone installment.

The result is a book that is clearly transitional. But one that also must be consumed to truly “get” the entire series. Think of it as the broccoli on your plate that you have to eat before you can have dessert.