A Feast for Crows

George R. R. Martin is finally done with the fourth book in his Song of Ice and Fire series. It's called A Feast for Crows, but will always be known as "Incest Fest IV" to those of us who first discovered Martin during our Europe trip in January of 2000.

When you're backpacking around Europe, you try your best to shed every bit of unnecessary luggage, so although I usually read like a maniac while on break, I took only one book with me on our three-week trip. My roommate did the same, as did the other readers in our group. As a result, by the end of the trip, everyone had read everyone else's books.

We were on a train at some point, when one of the non-readers picked up my roommate's book (A Game of Thrones), opened it to a random place, read two pages, and dropped the book with a look of disgust, "It's all about incest!", at which point the "Incest Fest" moniker was born.

No, the books are not all about incest. However, there is one incestuous brother-sister relationship between two fairly major characters.

Overall, I like the books very much; they are well-written, have excellent character development (each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character), the fantasy world is realistically and richly imagined, the subplots are many, creative, and coherent, and Martin never follows any of the plot rules that usually apply to fantasy (especially the one about not killing off multiple major characters), so even though the books aren't exactly plot-driven, we (the readers) are kept on our toes. My only fear is that Martin will die before he finishes the series. Yes, I'm morbid.

Off to put Feast on my Amazon wishlist...