Vintage magic in a modern vessel

Muirwood: The Lost Abbey (Kindle Serial) by Jeff Wheeler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It's difficult to rate or review a story based only on the first chapter, but since that's what the ARC contained...

For me, the best thing about Muirwood: The Lost Abbey is the comfortably nostalgic feel of it. It has a lot of the fixtures that you might expect from a high fantasy novel: the exiled royalty, the special object, the quest for a source of magical power. If I was reading a lot in the genre these days, I might be exasperated by the familiarity of it. But since I haven't, I actually thought it was pleasant to revisit those old themes but in comic form, which makes it more unusual.

When it comes to the art and text, what stood out to me was the quantity of text - there's a lot of it, describing how Maia, the main character, perceives and thinks about the world. I didn't quite get the symbiosis of words and imagery that I get from most graphic novels. Instead, this felt more like an illustrated storybook where the text is the focus and the art provides a backdrop - it amplifies the nostalgic atmosphere, and not in a bad way. I felt that the art could be a little more expressive, but that's just a personal preference.

There's not a huge amount that I can say about the plot and the characters. I liked Maia's slightly detached way of looking at the world, and the magic system is hinted at just enough to be intriguing. Some of the other characters aren't particularly developed and the premise for the quest seemed a bit rushed and thin. I'm not sure yet if I'll commit to reading the next installments in the series, but I wouldn't rule it out - I'm curious about what else inhabits the Muirwood world.

(As an aside, I learned that this book is part of a fictional universe accessible through Kindle Worlds - which seems like an interesting system for growing a book series by rewarding reader participation. In other words, you can get paid to write fanfiction.)

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.

View all my reviews