Indexing
By Seanan McGuire
ISBN#1477809600
Author’s Website: http://seananmcguire.com/index.php
Brought to you by OBS reviewer Omar
Review:
From the author’s words:
“Indexing is a fusion of fairy tale and modern police drama, sort of a ‘Once upon a time meets Criminal Minds.'”
This is how we meet Henry Marchen, the team leader of one of the ATI Management Bureaus field teams, who wakes up to a call that there is a Four-ten in progress and she has to get down there. Arriving at the scene, her teammate Sloane Winters (the Goth looking girl that is as usual angry), tells her that the Four-ten girl left and is on her way to the hospital, making things change. At the hospital they’re joined by Jeff Davis and Andy Robinson, their other teammates, and find that everybody in the hospital has fallen asleep (a Four-ten is a Snow White and only she is supposed to be sleeping). But now things are different and something is changing the narrative, making the Four-ten girl into a Seven-o-nine, a Sleeping Beauty, something that the team hasn’t seen before.
Now the hunt has started and they must find who is changing or manipulating the narrative and even the teams own stories because in their world there are no happy ever afters.
If you’re a fan of Seanan McGuire’s work, you might be thinking that you have already read this story. Well, yes. Indexing was originally a short-story that was featured on the book view cafe in 2009. The online version is no longer available and there isn’t any printed version of the volume (I have searched, but I haven’t found any, I’m not giving up). The 2013 story of Indexing was released as a kindle series novel, where you purchased the kindle book and every two weeks a new chapter was added to your kindle. It ran from May 21 through October 22.
Personally I really like this book, I like the way Seanan McGuire rhymes and the spells she creates.
“The first bite of apple tasted like autumn incarnate, perfect and indescribable and somehow more nourishing than anything else I had tasted in my life. It was the first frost and the hint of snow…
The second bite tasted like blood on snow, like roses thorns and needles pricking the finger of a queen-to-be, like black crow wings spread wide to catch the winter winds. I chewed again, swallowed again, bringing the story a little closer to the heart of me…
The third bite tasted like exotic poisons, like glass coffin sitting lonely in the snow, and like a prince who never came. I choked a little as i forced it down, but in the end down it went. and I opened my eyes on a world that was no longer quite the world that it had been only a few moments before…”
Sloane is my favorite character so far and then Henry. With the way that the author teaches us, once more, the stories that we took for granted as Disney showed us, Indexing teaches us that even if our stories look like they’re set in stone our actions and decisions is what forge our future.
Seanan McGuire is still deciding if there will be a second season for Indexing, but if you like it and want a second, purchase the kindle or the new release paperback. If you could choose what fairy tale to live in, taking in consideration that it’s not the Disney version but the original, where a happy ever after is not granted, which one will it be?
