Customer Reviews

A Dance With Dragons: Part 2 After the Feast (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5)

5 star:		(128)
4 star:		(38)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(58)

 

 

I delayed reading this series because of the negative reviews on amazon regarding this book and its predecessor, A Feast of Crows. I didn't want another unpleasant disappointment after the Wheel of Time, having enthralled me, plunged into dismal depths around book eight. With similar accusations leveled at Martin, I was wary.

After reading the whole lot back to back, I can only surmise that this is due to the lack of attention span of some readers. It was utterly riveting. Yes, the plot grows and grows, but allegations that Martin is losing track of his story are quite simply down to some readers inability to keep up. Tiny aspects of the first book turn out to have significance much later- there is no padding whatsoever, unless you consider richly detailed description to be such.

And despite the vast story and cast (the list of characters in the back of the book takes up dozens of pages by this volume) it's tremendously fast moving thanks to the author's formula of short POV chapters.

I suppose if you left gaps between reading books, you would probably lose track of things. Now I'm left to wait for book six I might end up doing so. But I'm sure if you google it, there'll be synopses somewhere on the net.

This really is a story to immerse yourself in. Utterly tremendous- full of intrigue, treachery, sex and violence, a dash of the supernatural, unpredictability, all wrapped up in a medievil realism and harshness that both enthralls and appalls. But Martin's greatest strength is in his characterization. Everyone is an individual in this book- some are hugely original, some are more traditional fantasy characters. And like all the best fantasy, there is no tedious, unbelievable good versus evil going on. No unfeasible Tolkienism. It's about people struggling through turbulent times. Some characters who commit atrocious acts early on end up earning your sympathy, and some you might like at first might lose your affections in time. And if you want 'goodies' to root for, look elsewhere. This as realistic as fantasy gets- the depth and scope is up there with Robin Hobb and Rothfuss.

It's damn near perfect.

This is a great read, one of the highlights of the past decade in fantasy fiction for me personally, gripping throughout all the way to the climactic cliff-hangers at the close of the book. I would definitely say that this was worth the wait.

The character arcs of Theon Greyjoy and Stannis especially were real highlights for me as well as the new 'wild card' POV following the exploits of the Young Dragon. George Martin has a way of lulling you in and making you think that you have your opinion set on a character before gradually chipping away at your preconceptions...I won't say any more. All in all this was a very good read and my only bugbear is that there will be another long wait before we can return to Westeros.

On a final note, it is highly disappointing to see the backlash of 1* reviews based on human error and lack of research on the part of purchasers thinking that this is a 'new' book. It clearly states that this is part two of the fifth volume in the product info and has the name 'A Dance with Dragons' blazoned on the cover. Please make a complaint to Amazon regarding the external advertising of this book if you have to, do not besmirch George Martin's content with bad reviews based on your perceptions of Amazon's advertising team.

Am I alone in finding it really irritating just how many people are giving Martin's excellent series low scores either because they expect the complex multi-threaded story-lines wrapped up nice and neat at the end of each book; or because they got confused that the publisher and distributor decided to release what was over 1,000 pages in hardback as two books in paperback?

As far as the actual content is concerned, I have found A Song of Ice and Fire a riveting read - even part 4 which was perhaps the driest read - with no dragons or Others to break the political machinations and multitude of betrayals. I suppose that since Martin's main strength is without a shadow of doubt in his masterful characterisation - the one book where political narrative took centre-stage was always bound to have seemed slower than the rest.

But having thoroughly enjoyed his triumphant return to form in "A Dance with Dragons" (parts 1 and 2 and yes, I was almost caught out too :-)) I now look forward to seeing how Martin manages to draw these myriad of loose threads back to the leaderless Westeros, where I'm guessing we will be reading about the Direwolf and the Dragon (and the half-nose Lion?) fighting side-by-side for the future of humanity. If the concluding two books are going to be as good as what we've had so far, well I don't know about you, but I'm prepared to wait another few years.

I almost admitted defeat with this series after Feast For Crows as I felt that most of that book was subplot and asides which really didn't do much to move the story along. However, DWD Part 1 picked up the story nicely and gave us plenty of information on the characters I actually care about reading so I was back in the swing of it by the time I got to Part 2 and I wasn't disappointed.

It's nice that many of the characters in this book are in the same place so we get a good insight into different views on the same events rather than hopping form King's Landing to the Wall, to the Riverlands, to Dorne, to the Iron Islands and then to Mireen before we find out the next bit - something that was getting increasing irritating in the earlier books. Just tell us the story for goodness sake! I missed hearing about Sansa and I can't really see where he's going with Arya and we seem to have a huge array of people who don't seem to have anything much to do except confuse readers by adding to an already excessive cast of characters! However, Tyrion continues to be fascinating and I really enjoyed how his character developed. I am always glad to see his or Jon's name at the start of a chapter, something that I can not say about all the POV characters I'm afraid.

I think it's quite obvious that this series could have been at least 2 books shorter and still the wonderfully deep and colourful epic that it is. However, GRRM has build us up nicely to what I hope will be a dramatic conclusion in Winds of Winter. I just hope that he has the ending in mind and he can still pull all the threads together as he has woven a very wide but intricate web and after all of the hours I've devoted to reading the series I really want it to go out in a roar of dragonfire rather than melting into a puddle of slush.

Sometimes an author can drag out storylines and twist plots until the point the reader loses interest or has reached that exasperation point where they just want a conclusion... That is far from the case with the 2nd part of the paper back version of A Dance with Dragons. Martin has managed to leave certain plots simmering in the background and weave new characters, that are entirely consistent with the past books, that open up exiciting new fronts.

The pace of A Dance with Dragons is better than A Feast for Crows and features far less of the introverted point of view (PoV) chapters that are a weakness of Cersei and earlier Cateyln.

The main plot lines are again converging which creates a more cohesive and exciting read. However, the Stark children PoV chapters remain a bit of side show and need to start having relevance otherwise they risk becoming tiresome, though some more on Rickon would be intriguing, I suspect to be told through Osha or Lord Davos.

As always, Martin has brutal disregard for the status of his characters and will kill them off without hestitation, though the "world went black" only to find out later the character was rescued has been strecthed to the limit.

The book ends with a great unexpected development from one of my favourite characters and reminds us just how factional Westoros remains.

Can't wait for Winds of Winter.

i was so looking forward to this book,what a disappointment! where was the remaining characters in this book? what is happening to them? there was so many new character introduced, that has no relevance to the book,i found myself skipping parts of the book,just so i could finish it quickly,only to now find out that this story is nowhere near finished....yawn! what started as a riveting set of books feels as if the author is now stringing out another book just for the cash!

I bought it as soon as it was released, being a big fan of the first books and the TV series. However, I really didn't like it. It looks like G. Martin lost the whole point of his own story. A Dance with Dragons reminded nothing of the first books, it was boring, the characters were so many I lost count and I think that all this pages of blah blah could easily be summed up in a few chapters. I kept reading hoping for a twist or at least something intriguing to happen around Westeros but nothing happened. What a disappointment. This review applies equally to part 1 and part 2 of the book.

I am going to finish this series but.....

There a couple of things to say about Mr Martin: firstly he has a bit of a horror streak running through much of his work; secondly, he has absolutely no qualms about killing off the characters he has made attractive to the reader. This has the benefit that you really have no idea what is going to happen next but it does get a little wearing when your favourite gets topped suddenly and violently!

This book is better than the last but not hugely so. I find he has an irritating habit of introducing large numbers of bit part characters with relationships that can only really be divined by looking at the guide in the back. Their names tend to be quite similar and this leads me to be confused frequently. Due to the gaps he introduces to the narrative and the way chapters start and are named, you never quite know what you are reading until a page or so into each section. Good if you like that sort of thing (Iain M Banks does this quite a lot but his books reward rereading and I will not be able to do this with these) but irritating for me.

I suspect that he spends an enormous amount of time developing the story and his characters with interconnecting charts on his study wall and they are all probably terribly consistent. However, for me, the book just does not gel. Even with the Reek character, you end up not really caring whether he survives or not. The baddies are terribly bad and go around doing horrible things even though most of their various families seem to have lost entire generations. Where have all the new family member come from and knowing they are all going to get it in the end, do we care? I ended up not caring much and that means the pleasure was few and far between.

In summary, the characters are engaging but the complexity and number of different people in the plot(s) make this a difficult book to give more than three stars. He says at the end that he found it a very hard book to write and I think his desire to be clever has probably taken the pleasure away from the author and the reader.

Books 1-3 are ok. Books 4-5 is more of the same. No conclusion. Two main battles against the winter and against the dragons never happen. A bit disappointing.

There are lots of conflicting views and reviews on where we've for to with GoT. HBO's serialisation of the early instalments has undoubtedly brought these books to a whole new audience, and that can only be a good thing (mainly for GRRM but for fantasy as a whole). The first three books are action-packed affairs with shocks aplenty. The pace slows in Feast. Some readers didn't seem to like that, though I felt it was a welcome pause to draw breath which allowed for characters to be further developed. So, what about Dance (and this is a review of Dance as a whole, not of the rip-off marketing ploy (for the second time in this fantasy series) of splitting the book in two)?

Well, I liked Feast, so I gave it four stars. With this, I find myself almost edging downwards. I'm still interested, because I like these characters and I've invested a lot of time (and some money!) in following them. But I felt with this one that when the shock came (it was a shock for me and I'll say no more about that) I felt, Oh, here we go again. And I still feel a bit like that. A couple of the narrative threads left me wondering what the point of a few hundred preceding pages was. For the first time, I'm starting to feel that GRRM's grip is loosening. There are so many threads now that it's so difficult to keep track of where they all are.

Has the story been moved on significantly by this latest hefty volume? Honestly? In my opinion, no. It's like we're watching a really long game of chess (or cyvasse, if you prefer), and while we've been watching, the pieces have moved only a little. But what's happened has all been a bit peripheral. We are no clearer at all about what the major threat is. There are characters scattered all over the place. And there are so many that I really fear for the shape of future instalments.

It took me around 8 volumes of Wheel of Time before I gave up on that. For the moment, though, I'm happy to stay on the GoT train in the hope that, like Jon Snow, I know nothing.