There be spoilers all below the jump, so only click if you've read at least through George R.R. Martin's A Storm of Swords. Or if you don't care about spoilers. Or if you like being confused by details of books you've never read about. Who am I to judge? On tap today: the Lannisters and the Starks.
I'm hard-pressed to think of a series, fantasy or otherwise, that demands as much patience and open-mindedness from readers (I haven't read The Wheel of Time or The Dark Tower, so if they demand more, I'm willing to accept that, as well as suggestions as to whether I should check out either). I don't mean that so much in terms of length, though the books are long, if highly readable. Rather, the sheer number of perspectives on events and the time we spend exploring each of them means that we can't take anything for granted, not even how we feel about some of the worst, most manipulative, most violent characters in the series.
And that refusal to assign right or wrong, or to allow us certainty, is nowhere more evident in the shift of the balance of points of views from the Starks to the Lannisters. Eddard Stark and Catelyn Tully Stark's children are undoubtedly the novel's core characters and perspectives on events in Westeros, as well as the bridge from one generation in the continent to the next. But even though the early books spend a huge amount of time building up those perspectives (and Catelyn's) and getting readers invested in the rightness of those perspectives, Martin begins undermining their, and our, understanding at the same time that he's constructing it.
At first, it's relatively easy to accept Tyrion Lannister as a counterpoint to the Stark family if only because he's such an outcast in his own house. He is sympathetic to Jon Snow as a bastard, and to the rigor of some of the men on the Wall. He's kind to Sansa Stark. There's nothing about his plans to crush Stannis Baratheon that threatens our sentiments, because Stannis isn't a particularly easy man to like.
It's rather vastly more difficult when Martin asks us to spend time in the head of Jamie Lannister, the man who commits the novel's first act of terrible violence, who brings disaster into the Stark's imperfect Eden at Winterfell. It's uncomfortable, not simply because we've come to intensely dislike Jamie, but because if we find we can like or respect what we find there (Which, of course we can. Martin's too smart to let us dip in simply to be disgusted.), it would call into question our interpretation of nearly every other character in the novel. Jamie's love for his sister comes to seem like passionate weakness rather than lawbreaking, his murder of a king an act of justice rather than of evil. Introducing Jamie in particular as a point of view character upsets our understanding of the history of Westeros, in a nice foreshadowing of the stories Barristan will tell Dany.
I think the hardest thing for me about reading A Feast for Crows is going to be the presence of Cersei as a point of view character, and the absence of Jon Snow. Like Tyrion, Jon is an outcast in his family, but instead of interacting with the Lannisters, Jon is our portal to the world beyond the Wall, which if less feudal and complex, is certainly as rich as life in greater Westeros. And he and Arya are my favorite Starks. Cersei seems a poor trade to me. But of course, that's the challenge Martin's putting to me, and at this point in the series, I'm smart enough to anticipate that I'm probably going to get something rewarding out of her presence in the story.
It's a relatively gutsy move to transition from the Starks to the Lannisters, and to choose the Lannisters rather than the Baratheons. We might have been enable to envision loving Renly in advance, or appreciating the order of Stannis's mind. But Martin picks the Lannisters, and leaves us outside the brains and worldviews of men like Tywin Lannister and Robb Stark. He's intentionally taking the most complex routes through Westeros and Essos, and through our story, and gambles on us to come along.