The Blight of Muirwood by Jeff Wheeler

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Category: Young Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Content: Clean


The Aldermaston, the protector of Muirwood Abbey, is directed by the Medium to make Lia the new hunter of Muirwood. This will take some doing and a lot of training, but with leather bracers, a shooting glove, and quivers in hand, Lia rises to the challenge. Her first real order is to protect Ellowyn Demont from rivals like the Queen Dowager and the Earl of Dieyre. Lia knows very little about the princess's land of Pry-Ree, but when Ellowyn is abducted, Lia will join forces with Colvin to bring her back. Lia and Colvin must venture into the heart of a fallen kingdom, one devastated by an encroaching sickness called the Blight. It is here that a dark new secret is revealed - one that will make safeguarding the Abbeys nearly impossible.

This is the second book in the Legends of Muirwood series. I've enjoyed Wheeler's books in his other series a lot, and I liked the first book in this series pretty well. But overall this series feels rather mediocre. The main character, Lia is too much of a Mary Sue, and the love interest, Colvin almost seems to be bipolar. His angry reactions to things don't make sense to me, and quite frankly, I'm not sure how Lia ever fell in love with him with the way he has treated her. Wheeler also tends to tell instead of show at times. Lia goes through training to be a hunter and that is just skimmed over. The result of this is that some of the things Lia is able to do in the book do not feel believable. How is a girl her age able to best much older, more experienced opponents?

I also felt that the second half of the book went a bit weird. It has too much religion thrown in. The author was obviously inspired by religion. I don't mind that as long as it isn't so glaringly obvious, but here it's too heavy handed. It weighed the story down and I didn't care for the way some things were portrayed. One example is that there is an evil spirit-type character in the story that is a woman, and it's said that only women can be recruited by her. I didn't really care for this portrayal, or the fact that it's stated that it's because the women in men's lives have a lot of influence over them, thus being able to lead them to do evil. It was made a little better by the fact that only another woman could defeat her, thus saying men are too weak... well, I'm not sure if that makes it better. I don't think I like what that is saying about women or men. This part of the book almost ruined the whole thing for me. I was really happy when I got through that weirdness, and the rest of the story continued. Needless to say I am less enthused about this series than I was, but there is only one book left, and I really want to know how this ties into the Kingfountain series, so I'll probably finish it.