Never one to be short on ideas, Jeff Wheeler further perfected his craft through storytelling during games of Dungeons and Dragons during high school. Inventing stories to bring these games alive, Jeff would engross his friends and family members as they played the fantasy game. July 11, 2022: Fairly standard epic fantasy world building but some fun and unexpected twists and turns. I’m liking this better than I thought I would, several other books I’m reading but I’m leaving those on the shelf to focus on this.

There's a fair amount of world-building with lore & vocabulary to process - it does make it feel a little tedious at times because it requires more focus, but by 15% I was pretty solidly engaged for the duration. Another fabulous story and series with Jeff Wheeler. This is the second installment in the Dawning of Muirwood series and tensions continue to be high as things continue to happen and evolve in this second book of this series. The magic system is fairly straight-forward. Magic spells are cast when the spell wielder correctly pronounces the activation words.Eilean is a wretched living in Tintern Abbey when the Aldermaston informs her that she will be leaving to help build a new Abbey at Muirwood. At first, she's excited, especially since her best friend Celyn will be going with her. However, the Aldermaston drops a bombshell on her, she'll be the servant to the Druid Mordaunt, a powerful druid that has been held prisoner in the old castle at Muirwood, her job is to befriend him so he will reveal where he's hidden a tome of magic. Eilean is terrified but determined to do her job and prove her loyalty to the Aldermaston. However, the longer she is in Muirwood the more she comes to believe that there is something very wrong within the Mastons and it's not Mordaunt. The author is Mormom/LDS, and it does appear to imbue the story with a sense of allegory to their founder's story, as well as some thinly veiled references to Scripture & the Apostles, but it's not proselytizing, and the themes of growth and awakening from ignorance are universal enough to generally appeal.. This book has a strong start, it keeps the reader interested and pushes through, in the middle and then it ends without an ellipsis instead of an ending. Wheeler doesn't respect the reader enough to give them the satisfaction of an ending. Instead, the third act includes a minor quest, a minor victory and sets the stage for the next book. The world-building is excellent and continues to build on the already well documented lore from previous series by Mr. Wheeler. It’s so exciting to see some of these places that I’ve seen previously, but this time, to see how they started. Because he has based his world off of real places, he can really dig into what everything looks like and make it feel legitimately real. The abbeys, the landscape, the people, it all just feels like we are transported in time rather than transported into another world. A young woman’s burgeoning powers make her Muirwood’s most wanted in a breathtaking novel by Jeff Wheeler, Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Druid.

The question of who's really the good guys & who's really the bad guys is a fun bit of mystery - though admittedly there's also some stereotyped characters that did make me roll my eyes. It was Goodreads that provoked me to give this book a try. I saw the opinion of a reader who I've agreed with about a few books in the past give it high marks so I thought I'd give it a chance.This book could have been a 4-star affair for me, or even better if there had been a blow-me-away kind of ending. Instead, I can't give this book more than 3 stars. I recommend it, but do so conditionally because I can't possibly tell you if this book is worth your time until/unless I read on. It's impossible to have a complete opinion on this book because it's an incomplete book. I strongly suspect I'm going to read on in the series but I do so knowing that there's a level of uncertainty and unreliability going on here. And while I'll start the next one, I can't tell you for certain I'll finish it because until the final book in the series, I know there won't be any closure. It'll be minor climaxes with limited falling action and no resolution so if it takes a turn I don't like, I'm bailing. Some trilogies suffer from the curse of the middle book, where the second in the series feels more like a placeholder than a worthy successor to the first book. Fortunately, “The Hunted” doesn’t fall into that category. One thing that is consistent in each story that I absolutely love, is how the main characters and their mentors quote the Bible without calling it the Bible (they call it the "tomes), and teach Biblical values in a way that doesn't come off at all preachy. The stories are too intricate and complex to have been created as pure morality tales, and I don't at all feel like I'm being patronized, even though I know the way I phrased that, it sounds that way. Instead, they're instructive. Wheeler's books remind me a bit of the way Jordan Peterson describes Dostoyevsky's characters: they're not just entertaining characters, they're a study in human psychology. You become vicariously wiser by reading Dostoyevsky's fiction, or at least Peterson thinks so. That's how I feel about Wheeler's stories. They seem "important," in a way that pure entertainment could never be. The character of Hoel has been butchered, this man is a very different person from the Hoel of the first book. He is no longer the calculating, smart yet restrained soldier, but a clumsy lovefool who goes a complete 180 at the end in his morals and convictions for no apparent reason. The forced enemies to lovers trope attempt does not work as Hoel's tenderness towards Eilean was clear from the previous book. A slowburn warming up to eachother would have been much more satisfying instead of the sudden 0 to 100 we were met with. So, I've done a lot of complaining so far, but the truth is until the end I was really enjoying this book and the writing. Wheeler's ability as a writer isn't the problem. It's his choices. It is possible to write a series where the author cares enough about the reader that they give them a full story with an actual ending.