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A review by x0pherl
A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
4.0
After waiting 6 or so years for this book to come out I have fairly mixed feelings about it. For one thing, it suffers (as we knew it would) from the same structural problems as [b:Feast for Crows|13497|A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire, #4)|George R.R. Martin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1429538615s/13497.jpg|1019062], leaving out half of the characters, although Martin does work back in the FFC characters in the second half of this book. I avoided the pain of this by reading Feast for Crows side by side with Dance with Dragons, flipping back and forth as the mood struck me. This made FFC significantly more palatable, and based on discussions with friends, also helped through some of the slower sections at the beginning of Dance with Dragons (the Tyrion chapters seemed to be driving several of my friends nuts). I had hopes of building a chapter list so that I could assemble a unified eBook at some point, but after reading through, I'm not sure that this will prove entirely possible (it certainly won't be easy) without serious shifting around of chapter orders in both books. We'll just have to hope that when the TV show hits season four we get an "official" attempt at reconciling the texts into one single narrative order.
Beyond the structural issues, this book does seem to lag a bit, especially at the beginning. I have the sense after re-reading the series that the chapters in [b:A Feast for Crows|13497|A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire, #4)|George R.R. Martin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1429538615s/13497.jpg|1019062] and [b:A Dance with Dragons|10664113|A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, #5)|George R.R. Martin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327885335s/10664113.jpg|2936175] are significantly longer than the chapters of the first three. I'll have to take a look at the average chapter length at some point and see if it holds true, but the perception is definitely there. Once the action gets going, the book is what you would expect and carried me along quite well.
The ending of several threads (mostly those outside of Westeros) are quite frustrating. I was shocked, but quite satisfied, with the endings at the Wall and at Kings Landing, but the ending in Mereen wasn't so much of an ending as a truncation, and I fear greatly that Martin has simply deferred his "Mereenese knot" to another book, which probably means we're in for another long wait.
Beyond the structural issues, this book does seem to lag a bit, especially at the beginning. I have the sense after re-reading the series that the chapters in [b:A Feast for Crows|13497|A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire, #4)|George R.R. Martin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1429538615s/13497.jpg|1019062] and [b:A Dance with Dragons|10664113|A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, #5)|George R.R. Martin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327885335s/10664113.jpg|2936175] are significantly longer than the chapters of the first three. I'll have to take a look at the average chapter length at some point and see if it holds true, but the perception is definitely there. Once the action gets going, the book is what you would expect and carried me along quite well.
The ending of several threads (mostly those outside of Westeros) are quite frustrating. I was shocked, but quite satisfied, with the endings at the Wall and at Kings Landing, but the ending in Mereen wasn't so much of an ending as a truncation, and I fear greatly that Martin has simply deferred his "Mereenese knot" to another book, which probably means we're in for another long wait.