Posted: Jul 16, 2011 9:55 pm
by Lizard_King
It is done, I have danced with the dragons...

Holy Jesus motherfucking H. Christ, those were some intense five days I spent reading (four and a half, actually). Last night I dreamed that Tywin Lannister was at my front door, and he looked like my father... but let's not go into that.

Having just finished a book that I have been waiting for for some 5 years or so and not having all my wits about me right now, I would advise anyone to be skeptical of my words but still: that book was worth every day of waiting. I wont spoiler anything here (although there would be a hell of a lot of things to spoiler here, including some things that I refuse to believe just now), I just have to vent some of the awesomeness that seeped into my head from reading all day long.

As Martin says in his 'Note on Chronology' on one of the first pages, the Dance takes place at roughly the same time as the Feast, but continues the story after a certain point. That is to say, for about 60 or 70% of the book, we spend most of our time on the wall with Jon or in Meereen with Dany, while Brienne, Sam, Jaime and Cersei go about their business as described in the Feast. Then the Dance picks up their story lines and continues to weave a web of epicness. Also, towards the end of the book, some of the old POV characters from the Feast reappear to tell their stories a little further.

One thing that I didn't particularly like about the Feast was the fact that most chapters were just focused on the POV characters and their doings, with very little intersecting story lines, and hardly ever a meeting of two POV characters (I can't recall any). The Dance however follows the traditions of the older books, in that events are described from many points of views, and some important characters meet (or at least see each other).

As I mentioned before, there are a lot of outrageous things happening in this book, one a hinted at in my post above: Wikipedia gives you a list of all POV characters, and one of them you shouldn't recognize until the end of his (or her) first chapter. Apart from that, the last four chapters had me staring at the pages wide-eyed silently muttering 'what the fuck' over and over again. Well, Martin's books are known to finish with a bang (as Sean Bean would agree), but still...

So, in conclusion: everyone who has read and loved the first four volumes: you'll love this one, I promise you. Everyone else: get the fucking first books, start reading them, and rejoice in the cruel majestic world that is Westeros.

I should probably sleep...