It has been eleven years since A Storm of Swords hit bookshelves and six years since the release of A Feast for Crows. In the interim, A Song of Ice and Fire has scaled to new heights of exposure and popularity, and veteran fans of the series have grown impatient after years of hearing nothing of the story's cast left out of Feast. These factors have combined to make A Dance with Dragons the most anticipated epic fantasy novel of the last decade and have brought with them concurrently astronomical expectations.

Having had the pleasure of listening to A Dance with Dragons in unabridged audiobook form, I can confidently say that the book is another strong entry in the Song of Ice and Fire series and meets these lofty expectations.

In keeping with the best traditions of the series to date, Dance is chalk full of twists, turns, shocking revelations (including a true game-changer about a quarter of the way through), and deaths of major characters who, until now, most readers considered all but safe.

The pacing is unlike that of any other book in the series to date. With the exception of Jon, Tyrion, Daenerys, and a certain returning character whom Martin euphemistically describes as "worse for wear," each viewpoint character gets no more than a handfull of chapters, and several are not heard from again beyond the story's halfway mark. In spite of the book's immense scope, Martin paradoxically manages to conjure up a far greater sense of seemlessness than was present in A Feast for Crows, and by the story's end, one begins to get a sense of how the story's various pieces might come together.

Also noteworthy is Martin's impressively speedy development of newly-introduced characters, particularly seen through Tyrion's journey beyond the Narrow Sea, our glimpse into the workings of various bands of sellswords, and the chapters told from the point of view of a certain character whom we have heard of but never seen for ourselves. Martin also seemlessly weaves secondary and half-forgotten characters from the last several books into the story in roles that one might not expect.

It isn't only the characters with the highest chapter counts that make Dance such an engrossing read. Bran's chapters are his most poignant to date, and Martin (to the palpable relief of his readers) resolves the most pressing cliffhangers from A Feast for Crows through the 1-2 chapters allotted to the returning cast members.

Several caveats are in order, though. First, one of the central plotlines of the book takes a while to get off the ground, and one gets the sense that some of this character's chapters might have been trimmed to make room for more from other characters. Second, for all the excitement that Dance delivers, the book does end on a series of painful cliffhangers that will make readers pine for the relative ease of waiting to learn Brienne's "word" or Jaime's fate at the end of A Clash of Kings. In some ways the book also raises more questions than it answers, making Martin's prospects of finishing the series in just two more books seem potentially problematic: a positive or a negative, depending on one's perspective.

I mentioned at the start of this review that I had the pleasure of listening to the unabridged audiobook, and a pleasure it truly was, thanks to a characteristically inspired performance by award-winning and world record-holding veteran narrator Roy Dotrice who returns to the microphone by popular demand. Those who have listened to his readings of the first three books in the series have already experienced his uncanny ability to make it seem as though one were listening to Martin's characters themselves, through his superb command of accents, phrasing, and dramatic effect -- those who haven't would do well to start with A Dance with Dragons. Although his selection of accents doesn't always match his choices in his readings of the previous books, his reading remains nothing short of spellbinding throughout.

In sum, A Dance with Dragons (9.5/10) delivers Ice and Fire fans the action, drama, and forward plot development we have been waiting for for the last six years. When does The Winds of Winter come out?