The Muirwood Trilogy by Jeff Wheeler

• The Wretched of Muirwood
• The Scourge of Muirwood
• The Blight of Muirwood

A fun, satisfying, epic fantasy trilogy featuring a strong young female protagonist in Lia Cook/Hunter, who is based on Gwenllian ferch Llywelyn, the lost princess of Wales.

I wasn’t completely sure until after I got well into book one that this was a Y/A series. Chock full of interesting magic through a force called the Medium that both good and evil characters can harness, this was an orphan-girl-makes good tale set in a fictional medieval land.

While book one The Wretched of Muirwood, is a bit of a slow start, the story moves more quickly in book two, The Scourge of Muirwood, and book three, The Blight of Muirwood. In fact, book three feels like it could have been a lot longer, given that dénouement for the final volume and the full series seems crammed into the last 30 pages.

I’d love to see this series carried into an adult novel which would be able to delve more deeply into the nuances of the characters and what happens to Colvin, Lia, and their future generations. In the Author’s Note to The Blight of Muirwood, Jeff Wheeler reports the next instalment begins in a novella called Maia, which is available to read online.

January, 2014