A Feast for Crows: Commentary

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT! HD and Rose - this means you!

When you don't want to live your own life for a week, what do you do? Live someone else's!

So I hung around in Westeros and Braavos this week with Jaime and Cersei Lannister, Brienne of Tarth, Samwell Tarly, Arya of House Stark and Sansa Stark Alayne Stone, in addition to a number of others, who we had never seen before and whose importance eludes me. Arys Oakheart, for example.

Mr. Martin tells us that while writing the 4th installment of his Song of Ice and Fire series, the story grew and grew and he couldn't in good conscience cut things out, so he and his publishers decided to split it up into two books.

Now, while I don't mind an author drawing me into a tale, I'd really preferred to have at least one of my favourite characters in this book. No Daenerys, no Tyrion. Not even Bran, who I'm not overly fond of, but I'd like to know what he's up to, beyond the Wall there.

And can someone please kill Catelyn Stark once and for all? I really never liked her character.

How come Sandor Clegane didn't get to live? I kinda liked his character. And I felt really badly for him. I was hoping he'd get the chance to make up for things, like Jaime.

I had to giggle at the end of Cersei's storyline. So, my questions, or rather, things I'm looking forward to finding out about in the next book and 2 books from now* are:

1. Is the queen in Maggy the Frog's prophecy Margaery or Daenerys?
2. Is the valonquar Tyrion or Jaime?
3. Is Cersei finished? The prophecy seems to indicate that she'll watch all 3 of her children die before the valonquar kills her.
4. Is anyone ever going to believe the Night's Watch about the Others?
5. Jaime and Brienne: mutual respect or love interest?
6. WTF is up with Shae being in Tywin's bed? He hated whores. Will this ever be explained to my satsifaction? I think it was just the author trying to make Tyrion as pitiable as possible. I don't like this plot point. It's inconsistent. She wasn't smart enough to talk her way into the Hand's bed and he wouldn't have put up with taking his dwarf son's leavings.
7. Is Coldhands (with Bran beyond the Wall) Benjen Stark?
8. Did Sam fall in with the good guys or the bad guys?
9. What happened to Varys? Was he one of the men Arya saw/overheard plotting down in the tunnels under the castle in Book 1? Was the other Magister Illyrio? Did he plant the Highgarden coin to be found or did he actually forget it, which seems unlikely?
10. Where's the Blackfish going to show up? Maybe the Eyrie? (Or wherever they're spending the winter.)

Overall, I liked this episode better than the last one. It was well-written and didn't contain as much of the shock-value violence that I find so distasteful, no matter what the author says about realism.

I'm still waiting for my arkie-recommended smut to come in at the library. Gimme gimme!

*The author has commented that Feast for Crows and its companion will be complete storylines for the characters in them, as opposed to half storylines for all the characters. So I assume that the next book will not mention the same characters except in passing.