1 July, 2002
The Flight of Mavin Manyshaped
Sheri S. Tepper
1985
186 pp (MMPB)
Sixteen years after I first read the Mavin Manyshaped series from the school library, I finally found a copy of this one for a non-ridiculous (although not cheap, either) price, thanks to amazon.com's used book offerings. Go me.
Was it worth it? Well, it was definitely worth it to ease the pain of having an incompete set. Literature-wise, it was not as good as the other books in the series. In Flight, Mavin has been searching for her lost sister Handbright for over fifteen years, and has finally traced her to a strange community across the ocean from the lands of the True Game. The place is pretty cool: the towns are constructed on massive bridges strung across a giant canyon. Mavin arrives, finds Handbright (who's insane and pregnant) and trouble, and agrees to undertake an expedition to the bottom of the cavern, in return for protection for Handbright.
Unfortunately Mavin gets weighted down by a crew of secondary characters, whose side-plots take up much of the slim book. In particular, there's Beedie, a young woman who Mavin takes under her wing. Now, Beedie's a perfectly nice person, and her story isn't dull, it's just that it's not Mavin's story, and I wanted to read about Mavin. The core theme of this series is the inherent conflict between love and independence, which is the central conflict of Mavin's life. The exploration-adventure plot of this book doesn't really touch on that issue, although there are a few scenes which are pertinent. So, it's not bad, by any means, but it's lacking when compared to the other two books of the series.