For several weeks after George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons was released, I debated over how to proceed with reading it. Should I go back over all the preceding books that I hadn’t read in five years? Or should I read it side by side with A Feast for Crows, attempting to match chapter to chapter in chronological order? Ultimately, I decided to just dive right in, with some help from the wiki to refresh particular names or details.
Structure:
The fifth book in the series was the result of a publishing fiasco where the sequel to A Storm of Swords was split into two books due to its unwieldy size. Rather than dividing it chronologically, the volumes were split by region and character, with Feast covering southern Westeros and Dance focusing on the events in the North and the Eastern Continent. Unfortunately this resulted in a rather lackluster fourth novel that consisted of mostly fruitless plotting and intrigue and devoted the bulk of POV chapters to unrelatable or uninteresting characters like Cersei, Brienne, Sansa, and the Greyjoys. Continue reading
