(At this point, I'm probably obliged to note that there will be spoilers in the following review. I wouldn't ordinarily be so cautious about a widely read 10-year-old book, but many people are experiencing the tale for the first time through the HBO series, and the book covers material that won't be seen until the fifth season begins in a few months.)
Although there are various small problems with A Feast for Crows, they ultimately stem from one big problem: it's a book George R.R. Martin never meant to write. In several interviews, Martin indicated that his original plan for his series was to time jump his narrative after A Storm of Swords, picking up the tale after several years, and sprinkling in a few flashbacks to the "missing time." But after dozens of chapters and hundreds of pages using that approach, he found himself writing more flashbacks than narrative. The book wasn't working, he thought, so he scrapped his efforts and started over, abandoning the time jump plan.
The problem is, A Feast for Crows often reads like a few short stories -- originally meant to be told in flashback -- stretched unnaturally to fill out an entire novel. (Two entire novels, actually, but I'll get to that issue in a moment.) Each of the story lines in the book is slow paced and repetitive. Samwell spends an entire book traveling south from the Wall, a distance that took Tyrion a fraction of the space and word count to cover in A Game of Thrones. Sansa spends the entire book stuck in the Eyrie (a far less tense place than King's Landing proved to be in the earlier books). Brienne spends chapter after chapter wandering around in search of a "maid of three-of ten." Cersei spends all her time complaining about others' stupidity, as Martin over-stretches the revelation of the prophecy explaining her behavior.
Yet at least those are characters we've been tracking before this book (even if we haven't been inside some of their heads until now). Where A Feast for Crows really bogs down is in the subplots featuring two parts of Westeros where Martin has previously spent little or no time: the Iron Islands and Dorne. Even assuming these elements will later tie meaningfully into the overall story (I give Martin the benefit of the doubt, and I have my hunches too), the manner in which these sections are written is jarring and off-putting. Where most of the "viewpoint characters" of past books have been featured in at least a half dozen chapters, Martin takes the half dozen chapters about Dorne and divides them among three new perspectives. He does the same for the Iron Islands (to even worse effect, thanks to thoroughly reprehensible characters like Victarion and Aeron Greyjoy). The lack of one solid perspective on these subplots subtly suggests that they aren't truly important for the reader to invest in. And perhaps they aren't, but that's not the sort of thing Martin should be calling attention to... especially not when he's denying his readers what they really want to read about.
As George R.R. Martin started over with this new "bridging book" he'd originally intended as a series of flashbacks, it kept growing on him. And growing. And growing. Eventually, he had such a large manuscript that he chose to take the one book and split it in two. And because he was struggling mightily with the chapters surrounding Daenerys (a problem he'd later dub "the Meereenese Knot"), he made an unorthodox decision. Rather than follow all his characters, splitting his two books at the midpoints of their stories, he'd publish one book following only some of the characters. A later, second book would pick up the rest (the book that became A Dance With Dragons).
Ask any fan of A Song and Ice and Fire who their favorite character is, and you'll get a variety of answers. Still, the frontrunners are usually Tyrion, Jon Snow, and Daenerys. Arya sometimes sneaks in there (more now, thanks to the great performance of Maisie Williams in the HBO adaptation), but Arya's storyline in A Storm of Swords ends in one of the least cliffhangery places of all the threads in that book. By contrast, Tyrion is suddenly on the run after committing patricide, Jon Snow has just been elected leader of the Night's Watch, and Dany has decided to set herself up as monarch in the latest of her conquered cities. Those are the stories most readers are itching to continue after A Storm of Swords. A Feast for Crows ignores them all. And that crazy epilogue from A Storm of Swords, unveiling a vengeful, undead Catelyn? Even that is picked up only in one chapter near the very end of A Feast for Crows. (And it hasn't shown up on the HBO series at all.)
So A Feast for Crows is the Book That Wasn't Meant to Exist, focusing on the wrong characters, and unfolding at the wrong pace. No wonder it was such a letdown to those of us who waited for it. But that said, when it doesn't have to be the book you waited four or five years for, its good points become more apparent. And it does have them.
Despite the absence of Daenerys from the book, A Feast for Crows really is where the women of the series take center stage. George R.R. Martin has featured a number of important women in his saga, all well-rounded and interesting. Many of them have been "perspective characters" right from book one. But A Feast for Crows is the first book where the number of chapters written from a woman's point of view outnumber those from a man's point of view -- and it makes for some very interesting reading. Westeros is a man's world (how much more so than the real world is a provocative topic for discussion), and we get to see in detail how six very different women negotiate it: Arya, Sansa, Asha Greyjoy, Arianne Martell, Brienne... and Cersei.
Cersei. Many a fan probably cringed to read her name at the top of a chapter in A Feast for Crows. We'd seen George R.R. Martin let us into the heads of villains in past books, redeeming them in the process (to at least some degree). And if Martin planned to make us like Cersei as we'd come to like Jaime, or partially like Theon? Well, screw that! Fortunately, and far more interestingly, Martin had other plans this time. Cersei's storyline in A Feast for Crows is one of having it all and losing it all. Martin lets us in Cersei's head not to make us feel sorry for her, but to let us understand her. She makes one bad decision after another, incomprehensible to the outside world, but each logical when you're let in on her thought processes. And being right there for the ride down, you get the most satisfying feelings of schadenfreude in the entire series. Cersei blames the world and its sexism for all her problems, but she's her own worst enemy.
One other point that will always be in George R.R. Martin's favor: his prose. Martin has a powerful way with words. When he describes a dinner, your mouth salivates to imagine each course. When he writes of foul weather, you want to grab a blanket to huddle under it for warmth. When his characters tell stories of the horrors of war, you feel the weight of the experiences that haunt them. When they make bad decisions, you can simultaneously curse their stupidity while totally understanding why they do what they do. A Feast for Crows, for all the flaws in its actual construction, may actually have some of the most evocative and poetic writing of the entire series so far.
Still, it will surprise only George R.R. Martin himself that the writers running the HBO series have found a way to boil down both this book and A Dance With Dragons into essentially just one season of television. Narratively speaking, there's a lot of fat to be trimmed here. If Martin hadn't set such a high standard with the first three books of this series, I might see things differently. But he did, and so I see A Feast for Crows as deserving a B-.
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