Tales from the TBR: Indexing by Seanan McGuire

[owlmoose]

The book: Indexing by Seanan McGuire.

The summary:

“Never underestimate the power of a good story.”

Good advice...especially when a story can kill you.

For most people, the story of their lives is just that: the accumulation of time, encounters, and actions into a cohesive whole. But for an unfortunate few, that day-to-day existence is affected—perhaps infected is a better word—by memetic incursion: where fairy tale narratives become reality, often with disastrous results.

That's where the ATI Management Bureau steps in, an organization tasked with protecting the world from fairy tales, even while most of their agents are struggling to keep their own fantastic archetypes from taking over their lives. When you're dealing with storybook narratives in the real world, it doesn't matter if you're Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, or the Wicked Queen: no one gets a happily ever after.

How I found it: I'm a huge fan of McGuire's October Daye series, and I'm always up for a fairy tale retelling, so picking this one up was a no-brainer. I bought it new shortly after it came out in print, in early 2014. (It was first released in chapters as an Amazon Serial in 2013.) I can't really explain why it took me this long to actually read it; I suppose the mood just never struck me.

What inspired me to read it now: The TBR meme that renay tagged me in a little while back. Indexing was my answer to one of the meme questions, and I committed to reading it for this column soon. When it came time to pick a book for November, I ran a little Twitter poll, and this book tied with Luck in the Shadows for first place. I went with my gut and am glad I did, because I enjoyed this book quite well.

The verdict: This book should have been KJ-bait -- fairy-tale mashups, twisted and subverted tropes, and the classification of information as a plot point -- and fortunately, it was. The premise, that fairy tales are a force in the universe trying to re-write reality to fit their narratives, was intriguing, and McGuire has a lot of fun working that idea into our world. The ATI (which stands for Aarne-Thompson Index, a fairy tale classification system used by real folklorists) is the shadowy government organization tasked with recognizing and stopping incursions of the narrative. The librarian in me appreciated the difficulty of classifying incidents (where's the line between a Sleeping Beauty and a Snow White? should urban legends count as fairy tales? how do stories that depend on rigid gender roles deal with more fluid identities?); as any cataloger can tell you, subjects are rarely as neat in the real world as they appear on paper, and getting it wrong has consequences. If I misclassify a book, no patron will ever be able to find it, and it might muddy search results with an inaccurate hit. The stakes are rather higher for the ATI -- if they guess that the wrong trope is in play, and take the wrong action as a result, people sometimes die -- but the dilemma is familiar.

But at heart, Indexing is the story of Henry Marchen, an ATI agent who has spent her entire life trying not to live out her Snow White story, and her partner Sloane, who is also an evil stepsister and therefore Henry's natural enemy. It's one of the most effective twists on "good cop"/"bad cop" and odd couple partnerships I've ever seen. The rest of Henry's ATI team has an appealing found family dynamic, too. Without going into spoilery details, everyone on Henry's team has been touched by the narrative in some way, and I enjoyed seeing the different ways each member either embraces or avoids their destiny.

Because this book was initially released as an Amazon Serial, the chapters are episodic in nature. In some cases that works better than others, but all the story threads are tied together well at the end. The book feels like a police procedural as much as anything, with the last chapter in particular having the sense of the end of a first season, rather than a series finale -- the current enemy is defeated, and there is a sense of closure, but as many questions are left open as are answered. There is a sequel, which is already out; I look forward to reading it, but I do wish this first book stood a little better on its own.

Thanks to everyone who suggested I read this book now! And for some of the rest of you, I promise Luck in the Shadows will be next.

Comments

[readingtheend.com]

Ooo, excellent! I checked this out of the library on a whim the last time I was there, since it sounded right up my alley and I've still to this day never read a word by Seanan McGuire -- happy to hear that it worked for you! Maybe I'll read it next; I've been reading a lot of sort of heavy fiction and it would be good to get a small break from that.

[owlmoose]

Yay, I look forward to hearing what you think of it! I do want to warn you, though, that whether this will give you a break depends on your definition of "heavy". If you mean heavy as in dense prose, then you're good -- McGuire is always highly readable. But she also brings the feels, big time.

[transcendancing]

I hope to pick this up soon, and I am currently reading 'Luck in the Shadows'

[transcendancing]

I should add that I've already read 'Luck in the Shadows' before, but I didn't know there were extra books (I have read 4 I think? Maybe 5?) But I loved it back then and I am currently still enjoying it as a reread, while expecting it to have at least some elements I was blind to on first reading.

[owlmoose]

Ah, cool. I bought Luck in the Shadows when it was new, so an embarrassingly long time ago -- it may, in fact, be the oldest book on my TBR that I still intend to read eventually. :)

If you do pick up Indexing, let me know what you think!