A review by endlesseffulgence
A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin

4.0

i've been working my way through a song of ice and fire slowly, as a break from more difficult labor-intensive books, since the summer of last year. i was coming into these books as someone who watched all the seasons of the show and, for the most part, really didn't like it, only spurred to read them by having a friend who was a huge fan who insisted on their merits and made me curious. i've really fallen for the series since then; i think it's one of my favorites of the epic fantasy milieu (a mode i mostly am not a fan of). a feast for crows is the black sheep of the series; no dany or jon or tyrion, slower and lacking in major plot movement (even in context of a series which, to say it nicely, takes its time with its pacing) often considered to be a bad book that mars the series, especially following the rollicking and devastating momentum of a storm of swords. it's without a doubt my favorite in the series so far. martin's moment-to-moment writing has never been better, his insights into war and trauma and cycles of abuse and violence so much more searing and perspicacious; the new fronts of dorne and the iron islands are fascinating, compelling, and add so much thematically. i love where he takes characters whose perspectives were previously at the margins of the story: a besotted and beguiled kingsguard, a narcissistic, embittered and arbitrarily hateful queen regent who will do anything to maintain her power, all the while believing her trauma and love for her children justifies her every action, that her shrewdness and cold calculation rivals her dead monstrous father, an octopus-worshipper fundamentalist, a strong compassionate warrior whose defiance--both in body and in belief--of gendered strictures has caused her so much pain. they are all incredibly articulated within Martin's fascinating third-person limited perspective, which only sees and knows what the character sees and knows. all these stories are at their heights of pathos moving and horrififying and rousing and desperately, desolately sad. this is maybe the most elegiac, most pensive work of bestselling epic fantasy i've yet read. it's a book where characters wend around thousands upon thousands of rotting corpses; where the trauma of the last three books takes root and begins to bloom into something monstrous; where we see the world not solely from the perspective of the lords and ladies of westeros, but those outside this fold, of other cultures, those looking upon the ruin wrought in the wake. as in the book's most famous speech, it's a book of broken people looking on a broken world, where the good are drowned out by the passionate intensity of the worst, where the hurt and scarred cry rivers of blood to drown everything. i loved it. i found it so cathartic. and at its best, there is a deep kindness, an empathy, a knowledge that things do not have to be this way that makes it so much more rich than that show which so often felt like it hated people and hated the world.