Showing Memoirs of a Shape-Shifter by Thomas Kaplan-Maxfield

Nikki Helmik--anger-prone, no-longer-young feminist, single mother, and erstwhile Cambridge lawyer--following her father's recent death has returned to the vacant family home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, to begin a new and quieter life. Her yellow-shingled cottage lies under the branches of mysterious Dogtown woods, once home to Druids and witches. But Nikki grows increasingly unsettled to find herself caught by the charms of the princely Philip, a married man who has recently moved back to the family estate yet who proves maddeningly elusive.

Or has Nikki got it backwards: Is she in fact the fleeing one, mistaking emotion for feeling and presuming matters of romance as women's natural territory? The earth's escalating tremors soon leave her shaken to the core when she discovers the lost journal of her shape-shifting ancestor, Anne Cleves, a Druid princess and powerful magician living in Dogtown during the period of the Salem witch trials. Defending herself against her beautiful mentor's vengeance, Nikki must race against her own tangled desires and the bend of time while translating the arcane work, finally to be initiated into her own Druid nature.

This women's post-millenium journey of self-discovery swoops and plunges amidst the rocky cliffs of the New England coast and in its deep forests. Nikki's story is intertwined with her foremother's riveting first-person tale, vividly presented as living history steeped exotically in Celtic lore. Kaplan-Maxfield's artful story-telling provocatively enacts the mystery at the heart of the book: the power of words to make magic--in the process turning our conventional understanding of power on its head.

A work of fiction with Gothic undertones shifting between present-day and colonial New England, "Memoirs of a Shape-Shifter" contains within the third-person narrative of Nikki Helmik the found journal of her ancestor, Anne Cleves, written strikingly in first-person. A dramatic story of love, loss, and Druid magic, Anne’s journal strangely echoes Nikki’s own struggle to resolve the crises in her life. Haunted and inspired by her ancestor, Nikki becomes a Druid magician, resolving for herself the deadly attraction between power and love.

This psychological exploration of a woman’s all-too-contemporary personal upheaval oscillates between realism and romance, contemplative drama and adventure story, replete with Druid magicians, centuries-old curses, wolves, ravens, and the mystery of a broken brooch. Down Gloucester’s narrow streets, deep into Dogtown woods,teetering on granite cliffs and plunged into stormy North Atlantic seas, the reader is drawn into a labyrinth in which the age-old war of the sexes is given a new twist.

A spell-binding novel, "Memoirs of a Shape-Shifter" twists the eternal tension between love and power into a marvelous Celtic knot.


Review from Kevan Manwaring, The Druid Network:

"I have enjoyed getting to grips with this Protean tale. It is worth holding onto for the truth at its heart. It is full of secret treasure: about the mysteries of men and women, how the past inhabits us, and how the land shapes us. Kaplan-Maxfield’s attempt to walk between the worlds of the Actual and Imaginary, the ancient and modern, the secular and sacred, is admirable, fascinating and rewarding. . . .

"[T]his novel contains deep wisdom from a genuine tradition – enough to act as a primer for anyone interested in the Druidic Tradition – and it deserves to be acknowledged as an incredible achievement. If there had to be one great Celtic American Novel, I think this would have to be it. Kaplan-Maxfield has built a beautiful bridge between two worlds and two cultures, and any attempt at bridge-building on this fragmented planet has got to be admired. He should be proud of his effort, and if you take the effort the read this mighty tome, you will be rewarded with more than fairy gold."