As good as all the previous books in the Song of Ice and Fire series were, I found A Feast For Crows to be lacking. The action was slow-moving, and I just didn't care about the characters as much as I had in any of his previous books.

A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords were amongst the best books I've ever read. George R.R. Martin is a terrific author. But it took me three or four months to get through his latest book. It was just plain boring until the last few chapters. Martin is beginning to develop the same problem in his fiction as Robert Jordan has: too many characters, too many storylines. And the ones he focused on in this book were the ones I care about least. Even Arya, whom I've always said was my favorite character in these books, got boring.

He explains in an afterword why he left out all the setting's best characters:

"Hey, wait a minute!" some of you must be saying about now. "Wait a minute, wait a minute! Where's Dany and the dragons? Where's Tyrion? We hardly saw Jon Snow. That can't be all of it..."

Well, no. There's more to come. Another book about as big as this one.

I did not forget to write about the other characters. Far from it. I wrote lots about them. Pages and pages and pages. Chapters and more chapters. I was still writing when it dawned on me that the book had become too big to publish in a single volume... and I wasn't close to finished yet. To tell all of the story that I wanted to tell, I was going to have to cut the book in two.

The simplest way to do that would have been to take what I had, chop it in half around the middle, and end with "To Be Continued." The more I thought about that, however, the more I felt that the readers would be better served by a book that told all of the story for half of the characters, rather than half of the story for all of the characters. So that's the route that I chose to take.

Tyrion, Jon, Dany, Stannis and Melisandre, Davos Seaworth, and all the rest of the characters you love or love to hate will be along next year (I devoutly hope) in A Dance with Dragons, which will focus on events along the Wall and across the sea, just as the present book focused on King's Landing.

-George R.R. Martin, June 2005

And that's where he leaves us. I will definately be picking up the next book - this is a series that I've bought in on for the long haul, for better or for worse, much like Wheel of Time. I can only hope that in A Dance with Dragons, something happens.