Mavin Manyshaped
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Mavin Manyshaped is a shapeshifter within a series of nine novels written by Sheri S. Tepper that are collectively known as The True Game. The three novels telling the earliest part of the story focus on Mavin and are told principally from her point of view.
Books in the Mavin series:
- The Song of Mavin Manyshaped (Ace Books, 1985)
- The Flight of Mavin Manyshaped (Ace Books, 1985)
- The Search of Mavin Manyshaped (Ace Books, 1985)
All three stories were subsequently collected into a one-volume edition: The Chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped (1985).
The Song of Mavin Manyshaped starts the series out with Mavin as a girl within her shifter community of Danderbat Keep. Within the keep, there is a distinct shortage of females shifters of breedable age and Mavin is about to come of age. In the first book, she escapes from the keep, meets for the first time a young wizard who will play a large role in subsequent stories, and vanquishes an evil community. At the end of the book, she and the wizard must separate, but they promise to meet again in twenty years.
The Flight of Mavin Manyshaped traces a much-older Mavin as she searches for her sister, another shifter who escaped from Danderbat Keep. Mavin finds her way to a very unusual community built within a rocky chasm and there finds her sister.
The Search of Mavin Manyshaped, the final book in the Mavin series, places us twenty years from the time of the first book as Mavin returns to find the wizard she parted from so long ago. When he doesn't show up, she sets off in search of him.
Although set in earlier times than the Peter and Jinian trilogies that complete The True Game, the Mavin trilogy was written after Peter and so is able to take advantage of the larger back-story that Tepper was devising about the planet that houses the entire series. The series (and the back-story) reach fruition in the Jinian trilogy.
