While I really liked this book, I felt that some of its storylines felt a little incomplete in that they ended as if there was another chapter to come, without it really feeling like an end of the book cliff-hanger ending. Maybe that's just how I expect it to go with George R.R., and he was deliberately upsetting my expectations, or maybe this late in the series, once he gets to 1100 pages a bell goes off at the publisher's and they start blowing up his phone. Dance w/ Dragons still had all my favorite elements of a song of ice and fire (food descriptions, feudal local politics, fictional histories and mythologies, and Big Dumb Objects).