The Search of Mavin Manyshaped by Sheri S. Tepper

(Review written 1996)

In The Search of Mavin Manyshaped, Tepper pretty much wraps up the story of Mavin and the Wizard Himaggery. As agreed upon in Song, Mavin has been traveling the world for twenty seasons, and now is returning to Pfarb Durim to meet with Himaggery, who may or may not be her one true love. She arrives in town to find that the wizard has stood her up, but not of his own choice.
 
A messenger from Seer Windlow comes to share the information that Himaggery has disappeared while investigating ancient ruins and legends, and no one has been able to find him for seven years. Mavin sets out to find him, and along the way confronts old enemies, allies with old and new friends, and leaps evil wizards in a single bound.
 
Ultimately, she rescues Himaggery and they live together for a time. Mavin discovers that they are two utterly different types of people, and her free spirit won't allow her to stay with him. She is pregnant with his child, and leaves him without ever telling him about this or why she is leaving. I hate this kind of stuff. Foolish tragedy caused by failure to communicate.
 
It's been so long since I read the True Game trilogy that I've forgotten whether all this has any bearing on what happens there, but it seems to me that the hero of that trilogy might be Mavin and H's child, fostered out shortly after birth. It would seem to make some sort of sense out of things if that was the case. I'll have to re-read them some day and get back to you.
 
Anyway the story about Himaggery's rescue mostly seemed like some sort of filler to make everything work out in the end for them to be tragically separated, so I wasn't all that thrilled with this book. If you've been following the series, then you've got to read it for completion, but if you're already bored with things, then don't bother.

The Flight of Mavin Manyshaped by Sheri S. Tepper

(Review written 1996 )

In The Flight of Mavin Manyshaped, Mavin is in search of her sister Handbright, who took the form of a great white bird near the beginning of Song of MM and flew away from Danderbat keep. She comes to the land of the Chasm, where an interesting community has evolved, living on bridges and platforms. The arrival of Mavin's sister has been taken by these people to be a sign from the Boundless, and Mavin must cope with some rather unexpected events.
 
Tepper has created in this book an interesting caste-ridden society, with its own power plays and intrigues, and managed to weave it into the world of the True Game rather well. I think she's solved a dilemma that is probably quite common to writers, "What do you do with a new idea when you've got readers clamoring for the same old world and characters?". SST just files off the square corners to fit the new world into a round hole in the old one, and lets it be "discovered" by a familiar face. It works, too.
 
Near the top of this society she's created are the hereditary Bridgers, those whose skills open up new territory for the people of the Chasm. Over hundreds of years, they've created seven cities there, from the broken bridge at the top to the lost bridge near the bottom. There are three Bridger families in the chasm, and one of them is willing to go to any lengths to be the most powerful, including murder.
 
When Mavin's sister becomes pregnant by the priest of the Birder caste who has been set to care for her, the resulting disruption allows the nasty Bander family to take advantage of the unrest to make a power play. Also, at this time, there have been several incursions from some slimy beasties from way down in the bottom of the chasm, so Mavin and her allies set off for the bottom to: a. evade the Banders. b. destroy the beasties. c. defuse the religious controversy generated by Handbright's pregnancy.
 
Their journey to the bottom, and the interesting things they find along the way, make this one an even better read than Song, I think. The tale is told for a while from some other points of view than Mavin's, and Tepper does a pretty good job of creating a new and weird society, warts and all. Again, a nice light fantasy novel providing a good evening's read.

The Song of Mavin Manyshaped by Sheri S. Tepper

(Review written 1996 )

After many years away from the work of Sheri S. Tepper, I found some very nice paperback copies of "The story of the most famous shapeshifter of them all!" at the used bookstore a few weeks ago. I'd read Tepper's "True Game" trilogy back in the mid-eighties, and enjoyed it, but never got around to reading the Jinian or Mavin trilogies.
 
As you might have surmised, the tales of Mavin Manyshaped take place in the land of the True Game, where people are either born with Talent, and can become Rulers, Wizards, Necromancers, Dervishes, Healers, Armigers, Seers, Shifters or a number of other things, or they are born without Talent, and will only be Pawns. The trilogy, The Song of Mavin Manyshaped, The Flight of Mavin Manyshaped, and The Search of Mavin Manyshaped, take place before the events in the true game trilogy, and we get to learn a little more of the history of the characters we'd come to know in the world of the true game.
 
In The Song of MM, we enter the life of Mavin, a shifter of Danderbat keep. As a young teen, she is just beginning to display the shifter's talent of changing her body into nearly any form she desires, either fish or fowl, beast or plant. Due to a shortage of breeding females in the keep, any girls who manifest the Shifter gift are forced to mate with the Danderbat males until they have born three or four children. Only then are they allowed to leave the keep to pursue their own interests.
 
Mavin's older sister has been the only breeding age female left in the keep for several years. Barren, she has been forced to endure the attentions of all the keep's shifter males, who are eagerly awaiting the day when Mavin is officially named shifter and can join her sister in her "duties". Mavin has been kept ignorant of what being a shifter female really entails, and only through a chance bit of eavesdropping is she made aware of her fate.
 
Mavin has been given one of the most powerful shifter talents of all time, and when she learns what her sister has been going through all these years, she uses it to impose a fitting revenge on the brutal males, set her sister free, and escape from Danderbat keep with her younger brother, Mertyn. They travel to the city of Pfarb Durim, where Mertyn contracts the plague, and Mavin must brave the depths of Hell's Maw below the city to save him.
 
In the course of curing her brother's plague, she earns the friendship of the Seer Windlow, the Wizard Himaggery, and an entire tribe of Shadowpeople. She makes enemies of the Prince Valdon, the Demon Huld, and the Harpy Pantiquod. At the end, she and Himaggery realize that they may be in love, but she has not yet learned to be her own person, so they agree to meet again in Pfarb Durim in twenty years' time to see what may be.
 
All in all, an enjoyable read. Not especially deep or meaningful, but worth reading if you like light fantasy