Indexing by Seanan McGuire

Publication Date: May 21, 2o13
Page Length: 420 pages
Publisher: 47North
Available as: Print and Ebook
Available at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million
Read the First Chapter: http://www.tor.com/stories/2013/05/indexing-excerpt


Are fairy tales real? If so, how dangerous can they really be?

Seanan McGuire helps the readers explores a new way of looking at fairy tales, through the eyes of a field team employed by a secret government agency to stop these fairy tales from surfacing in the real world."...most important, thing you need to know about fairy tales: once a story starts, it won’t stop on its own. There’s too much narrative weight behind a moving story, and it wants to happen too badly. It won’t stop, unless somebody stops it."

Told from the point of view of the agencies top field team leader, Agent Henrietta Marchen (an adverted Snow White), you walk through different fairy tale stories trying to stop them from coming into the real world. The rest of the field team includes a wicked step sister, an elf from the Elves in the Shoemaker, a non story agent and a Pied Piper. Not only do you follow a fairy tale story through each chapter but you also are walked through the bigger fairy tale going on in the background oblivious to all.

This story was sometimes hard to follow, and though you were in a different fairy tale each chapter it was repetitive in some descriptions and slow to get to the main plot of the story. Finding this to be the only real down fall to the story, the new way of looking at fairy tales as a whole was enlightening. Being a huge fan of urban fairy tale stories, fairy tales told in different ways, I have not found one that I have read yet that views them this way. It makes you see the common fairy tale characters in a new light.

I was though, a little disappointed in the fact that there weren't all fairy tales introduced in this story, they introduced Mother Goose and  Alice in Wonderland which are not fairy tales. I also felt that a different title would have suited the book better.