The Wrathful Traveller Goodreads reviews
Readers love The Wrathful Traveller. Here are a few of the reviews on Good Reads:
Okay so this is technically book 2 in the series but I want to talk about Father Frederick specifically because I did NOT expect to love a priest character this much. He's stubborn, he's judgmental in exactly the ways you'd expect from a man of his time and station, and yet Gwelin never lets him become a caricature. You can feel how much he genuinely believes he's doing right by everyone even when he's wrong. One of the more human portrayals of faith I've read in fantasy.
I went into this expecting a "Merlin book" and came out with a full-blown obsession with Wilda. She's not some passive medieval damsel waiting around for things to happen to her, she's a mother trying to protect her son, trying to survive a pilgrimage that's slowly killing everyone around her, and quietly falling for someone she's not supposed to love. Her arc broke my heart in the best way. 5 stars, no notes.
I'm not usually a crusades-era historical fiction person but the way Gwelin folds Merlin's reincarnation mythology into the First Crusade timeline is so seamless I forgot I was reading fantasy half the time. The siege of Antioch sections in particular felt suffocatingly real, the starvation, the disease, the horses dying. You feel every mile of that pilgrimage.
This book is DARK. Like, genuinely wrestles-with-religious-violence dark, not "dark fantasy" as a marketing label. The epigraph at the start (the Lucretius quote about religion leading to evil) sets the tone and the book absolutely earns it. If you want your historical fantasy to have teeth, this delivers.
The Wrathful Traveller (Also in Swedish)
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