By George RR Martin
Read by Roy Dotrice
Reviewed by Gabby
A Feast for Crows (Book 4 A Song of Ice and Fire)
A Feast for Crows Overview:
After centuries of bitter strife, the seven powers dividing the land have beaten one another into an uneasy truce. But it’s not long before the survivors, outlaws, renegades, and carrion eaters of the Seven Kingdoms gather. Now, as the human crows assemble over a banquet of ashes, daring new plots and dangerous new alliances are formed while surprising faces—some familiar, others only just appearing—emerge from an ominous twilight of past struggles and chaos to take up the challenges of the terrible times ahead. Nobles and commoners, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and sages, are coming together to stake their fortunes…and their lives. For at a feast for crows, many are the guests—but only a few are the survivors.
A Feast for Crows Review:
STORY
The Good:
In this audiobook, we get to see things from Cersei’s perspective. I found getting inside her head and understanding what a complete b*tch she is to be truly fascinating. The story is still riveting, even with the absence of Tyrion, Theon, Daenerys and Jon- mostly because Martin drops little twists and revelations into the story as we go. Just enough to keep you interested. This is very much a story dominated by females (in positions of power mind you!) which makes a nice change from the usual portrayal of women. Their stories are even more interesting since Westeros is fundamentally patriarchal. It takes a certain ruthlessness to become powerful if you are a man. To become powerful as a woman requires cunning, determination and you’d probably have to sleep with a whole bunch of dirty old men.
The characters are great, Martin gives such emotional depth to each of them that it’s hard to know who to love and who to hate (excluding Cersei). Each character is so flawed and utterly human that you can’t help but pity them sometimes.
The Bad:
A lot of people consider this to be the ‘black sheep’ of the series and opinion is extremely divided upon it. I personally enjoyed it more the second time, which seems to hold true for most people. Those who originally hated it found it was their favorite book after a few re-reads. But for those of us who don’t have that kind of time on our hands I’ll tell you the main problems I had with this audiobook.
Very little progress is made plot wise in this audiobook. We learn nothing more about the advancement of the Others, no word of Daenerys’ movements in the East and most of the favourite characters have been cut out. Because there are so many points of view, it can take a while to get into each characters story arc and understand how everything fits together. ASOIAF is a complicated series and there is a lot to keep track of.
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CHARACTERS
The Good:
Cersei: “despite my obviously poor leadership skills, I refuse to take any advice”.
Jaime: ” I wish I hadn’t banged my sister”.
Brienne: “I am searching for a maiden of three and ten, fair of face with auburn hair”.
Sansa: ” Little Finger totally wants to bang me”.
Arya: “I am nobody”.
Asha Greyjoy: “my entire family are morons”.
Samwell Tarley: “Something is wrong, but I have no idea what”.
I really liked hearing things from Cersei’s perspective. I wasn’t expecting to like her or pity her- and I didn’t. She turned out to be every bit as nasty and malicious as she seemed. Cersei was also incredibly paranoid, convinced Tyrion was going to try and kill her and that Margaery would try take her power. This paranoia combined with a lust for power meant Cersei made some pretty crappy choices. She alienated all her allies from her. The harder she tried to keep them the more she pushed them away. Cersei’s power over Jaime was all but extinguished in this audiobook which was a relief (because Jaime is pretty cool). Cersei’s trying so hard to convince everyone that she’s a good Queen that she forgets to actually be one. All of her time and energy goes into scheming, plotting and back stabbing. It’s highly entertaining and the best part is we know she’s going to fall. Everything’s going to come apart and Cersei will get what she deserves. So the more awful she is, the more her punishment is justified and we, the listeners, love every second of it.
Jaime Lannister undergoes some serious improvement over the course of this audiobook. I don’t know if i’d go so far as to say he’s now a good man, he’s done some terrible things in his time. But Jaime regrets a lot of his actions and is trying to atone for them. Most of the characters start out pure and slowly become more spiteful and conniving as the series progresses. Jaime goes the other way. We start to see an honourable man who always pays his debts.
Arya’s character underwent some interesting developments. She seems to becoming quite ruthless and lethal. Arya’s obviously come a long way from Winterfell, she’s now so tough and independent that I firmly believe she’s going to be one of the few who might survive this series. Despite her clear desire to become an assassin and a real lone wolf, it’s obvious that Arya is still searching for some kind of ‘home’ where she can belong. I feel so sad for her because she’s lost all her family, has no direction in life other than to kill those who hurt her family and has no one to turn to. Even though the House of Black and White has taken her in, I get the feeling that Arya is going to keep searching for something that will give her a real sense of family and home. It will be very interesting to see where she goes over the course of the next few books, I hope she achieves her well deserved bad ass status, but that she finds some happiness too.
The Bad:
Alayne/ Sansa’s storyline seemed very weird and out of place to me. Sure it’s nice to know what’s going on with Sansa and that she isn’t dead. But her storyline really didn’t add anything to plot, except to add another layer of complexity and wonder what mischief Little Finger may be up to. One redeeming feature of this storyline is that Alayne seems to be twice the woman Sansa was. She is a lot more confident and sure of herself, whilst she knows her place, she isn’t afraid to assert herself. For Sansa, that’s a big deal since in the previous books she’s been about as useful as a wet hanky. Sansa’s storyline mostly frustrated me because it didn’t really reveal much about Little Fingers plans. Despite her close proximity to him, Sansa has no idea what he’s up to. Little Finger seems to have taken up the position of Lord of the Eyrie like a duck to water which makes me wonder whether he’s been the real threat all along…
NARRATOR
The Good:
Dotrice did a good job of narrating about a million different characters, he managed to find voices for all of them which is very impressive.
The Bad:
Ah. Oh dear. Poor old Roy, I think he may have lost it a bit in this book. Suffice to say his accents and pronunciation is all over the place. This makes for a very confusing the listener because we can’t really recognise who’s talking. Roy managed to say Brienne in about 10 different ways throughout the books. Gilly is now Jilly. Petyr is suddenly Peter (that really tore my nighty) and now Tyrion and Jamie seems to have Welsh accents? Just because Tyrion is the size of a leprechaun it doesn’t mean he has to sound like one. Such inconsistent narration is really distracting and ruined the book a bit for me. Sadly, Roy is the only person who has narrated ASOIAF so we’re stuck with his crazy accents and pronunciation. Here are some tips to deal with the slightly lousy narration in A Feast for Crows:
1: Every time Roy gives a character a different accent eat a piece of chocolate
2: Every time Roy changes the pronunciation for something angrily shout the correct pronunciation.
3: Try and become so focused on the story that you don’t even notice the weird accents/pronunciation anymore.
I hope you enjoyed our ‘A Feast for Crows’ Audiobook Review, come back soon!