Review: The Blight of Muirwood

Sorry it has taken me so long to get back into this blog!  

Today I finished up the audiobook from Audible for The Blight of Muirwood by Jeff Wheeler, narrated by Kate Rudd and published by Brilliant Audio.

I am reviewing this after having also just finished up the fantastic Warbreaker and Legion books by Brandon Sanderson, also purchased from Audible.  I highly recommend them, and I may end up reviewing them eventually, but not today!

Overall:  This book did not surprise me after having listened to his last book unfortunately.  There were a lot of the same themes (religion, faith, gender roles), and a lot of the same literary issues I was not able to put my finger on last time.  The book begins with Lia having been promoted to the Abby's Hunter, and progresses from there.  While Lia remains a very standard, very typical "Mary Sue," the plot itself is slightly more complicated, and there is much more character development this time around.  This book attempts to flesh out the world and the relationships between the countries and the religi--- magic system.  This is going to have more spoilers than my previous review, I'm sorry!

• Pros: 
• The character development occurs much better in this book than the previous.  Lia previously seemed to be a lovestruck character who was subservent to an emotionally abusive boy, and despite his consistent abuse she fell in love with him for unknown reasons.  In this book Lia seems to have obtained at least some self-respect and eventually SPOILERS: tells Colvin off and says she needs to move on.... right before he confesses that he loves her and suddenly stops becoming a dick for the rest of the novel. Thank Idume---God.
• To piggy-back off of that idea, the interpersonal relationship between the two main characters is also more well developed.
• The plot this time is much improved.  I would compare the difference between the two novels to be similar to the difference between The Name of the Wind and A Wise Man's Fear.  In The Name of The Wind, the plot is mildly convoluted where the character is sprawling from A to B to A to C to A to B to C to D to Q to A, etc..  In A Wise Man's Fear the plot structure is essentially where the character goes from A to B to C to D to E to F to E to D to C to B to A.
  
  This book is more similar in plot structure to The Name of the Wind than A Wise Man's Fear, which I personally find to be much more interesting.  For comparison The Wretched of Muirwood is much more similar to the plot structure in A wise Man's Fear

• Cons:  
• There are two prominent cons that I was not able to name last time that are also incredibly prominent here, and I want to make a special note of them because they are pervasive so far through both novels.
• All of the characters speak with the same "voice" and have little personality.  I will touch on this a little more in a separate con, but basically characters are either "good" or "bad," and all of the "good" characters speak almost identically, and all of the "bad" characters do as well.  I compare this to Brandon Sanderson's new Mistborn trilogy where Wax and Wayne have completely different personalities.  Here there are two personalities, "good" and "bad."  The only thing that changes is the situation that those personalities are in.
• This one is going to be long-winded, I'm sorry.  There are pretty stark gender roles, which is okay if the society in the world supports that but there are way too few females in the book;  literally 6 that I can recall.  All of the females are either delegated to household chores or poorly developed.  For example: Pasqua is a cook, Sowe is not much more than a maid, the main villain (the queen) is essentially implied to be a whore/slut.  Ellowyn is there to literally be a plot device and useless, and Marciana is Colvin's sister... and is again a plot device with little real depth to her character.  And Lia, who is only awesome because her parents are awesome, and because we're told that she has lots of faith.
  
  I can not think of another female.  The reason this is a pretty significant negative is that it is not consistent within the realm.  Mastons are encouraged to marry other mastons and have kids, because that makes your kids strong in the Medium (because faith is genetic I guess?).  Unfortunately if you have 20+ men and 6 females, 5 of which are not going to be Mastons, (and most of which of them are relegated to household chores or essentially devoid of personality) you will have a seriously difficult time  having Maston-babies.  Literally 6 females, all of which are either a plot device, the main character, or resigned to female gender roles.
• A lot of the issues I had with the first novel are still here as well
• The constant "telling" and not enough "showing."  If Lia is sad, we are told that she is sad because she has sad things happen to her so she should be sad so we're told she's sad.  We need to be shown that tears are streaming down her eyes and she is having a difficult breathing through her sobs.  There is so much telling in this book that it makes it seem uninteresting and boring, rather than engaging and compelling.
• The constant use of "faith" as a resource that allows for more magic to happen.  It will always be here and will always be on my con list, but basically it allows the author to deus-ex-machina Lia out of any situation.  It also appears that the same thing happening in Harry Potter is also happening here where a lot of the magic system is being made up on the fly, or at least it feels that way because those who "study" it are always surprised when Lia does new stuff that has rarely happened before, only to be explained much later, if at all.  Spoilers Below about how deus-ex-machina the Medium is:
• The medium literally brings Lia back to life from death
• And a couple new ones!
• The emotions of some of the characters just don't... make sense...  As I said prior Lia is enraptured with Colvin, who is consistently emotionally abusive.   There is one scene in this book where Lia mentions that she likes him, and he BLOWS UP at her, screaming at her and being generally pissed at her for... finding him attractive?
  
  Huh?
  Then a couple scenes later they resume as if nothing happened between them.
• There is a significant lack of different personalities as I mentioned before.  I feel the author is unable to process a "gray" and tried to through his character Scarseth.  Scarseth has literally kickstarted this whole story off last book when he brought Colvin into the abby, and eventually...  SPOILERS:  At the end of this book Scarseth is forced to kill Lia (which is when she is eventually revived by the Medium) against his will, and eventually gains his speech back.  After that he explains how he is incredibly regretful and sorry about every dickish and evil thing he's ever done and turns a complete 180, but without any personal development.  All that happened is someone who was a dick did dick things and without any personal sacrifice.  Then he gained the "good" voice I spoke about earlier and thus came true about everything he ever did wrong -- because that's what the "good voice" does... [END SPOILERS].  The main antagonist is another example of this.  She's an ass because.... she has always been an ass.  She is the now-widowed queen, and her husband's death can be said to be the reason she's now an ass, but it's revealed in the book that she has had a hatred for all Maston's and encouraged her husband the kill them all... but there's no clear motive, and none has even been hinted at.  It feels poorly thought out.  The good guys are good, and the bad guys are bad because that's all they are.
• A super quick one -- some of the plot seems to be there to solely cause tension and drama, but it does not help necessarily drive the reader's curiosity.  For example Lia's past was incredibly obvious to me ( and I do not consider myself particularly clever), but was consistently obfuscated and hidden from her throughout the entire novel.  After the grand reveal.... I am not sure why they hid it from her.  They kept saying that they were obfuscating her past from her for a good reason, but I don't get it, or it hasn't been told yet.  That feels cheap.
• And lastly I'm not sold on the narrator.  I don't know if it is the book, or the director, or just the actress, but the narrator occasionally speaks very staccato-like, with very weird toning and an awkward tempo.  This may contribute to the above complaint, but I'm certain that it is not the sole contributor.

Despite all of this, I still am at least mildly compelled to read the next book to see if it improves.  After I check out Dawn of Wonder:  The Wakening... probably...

People like numbers.  I give this a 

4/10 

EDIT:  There has been some good discussion on https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/4ck5my/character_age_and_believability/ about a post Mark Lawrence has made on the subject here: http://mark---lawrence.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/age-is-just-number.html.  This kinda outlines how I feel about Lia.  She is not realistically portrayed, and it really takes away from the novel.  This is not to say that it CAN NOT be done well, but rather that it WAS NOT done well.