Fairy Tale Fandom Book Report: Indexing

 

I bet you didn't expect to see me again.

Yeah, I haven't been posting on here much lately. I got to a point where I kind of hit the wall in terms of fairy tale stuff. It had taken up about 99% of my reading and entertainment. I got burnt out and had to take a break.

But, just recently, as I've been trying to use the resources at hand, I decided to dip into my Kindle library in between public library books and just happened to find the absolute nerdiest fairy tale fantasy book ever.

It's titled Indexing by Seanan McGuire, and it was released back in 2014 as part of the Kindle Serials program.

Cover of Indexing

Indexing follows the ATI Management Bureau, an organization whose agents intercede when fairy tales events crop up again in real life and regular people start to be pulled into “the narrative”. The cast includes a number of agents, most of whom are part of some story or have narrowly averted being part of one. There's Henrietta “Henry” Marchen, a woman born from a “Sleeping Beauty” and who's at risk of becoming a “Snow White”. There's also a confrontational goth would-be “Wicked Stepsister” named Sloane Winters. And there's also their archivist Jeffrey (whose last name I've forgotten) who's one of the Shoemaker's elves (he's not actually an elf, just super capable and efficient). And those are just a few of the characters appearing.

Now, you may be wondering what the ATI in ATI Management Bureau is. Well, remember how I said this was one of the nerdiest pieces of fairy tale fiction I've read? Well, the ATI is the Aarne-Thompson Index, sometimes called the Aarne-Thomspon-Uther Index. It's an index that folklorists and scholars use here in the real world in order to identify the type of folk tale they're dealing with. It was originally written in Germany by Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne, then expanded by American folklorist Stith Thompson, then expanded again by German folklorist Hans-Jorg Uther.

And Seanan McGuire wrote a work of fiction based around the concept.

The Aarne-Thompson Index

I'm guessing that McGuire just thought it would be funny to have agents calling out index numbers like cops call out codes for crimes. Like, if they ran across a Pied Piper situation, they'd be like “We have a 280 in progress!”

In all honesty, I've never read a book that was quite so aware of the complicated reality of fairy tales all while creating their own story about fairy tales coming to life. It acknowledges variants. It acknowledges how animated movies have impacted the perception of fairy tales. It acknowledges how the broad, poetic language sometimes employed by fairy tale retellers would turn into something very scary when taken literally (apparently having “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood and hair as black as ebony” just ends up making Snow Whites look spooky). It acknowledges that some stories that get lumped in with fairy tales (Peter Pan, The Little Mermaid, etc) aren't folk tales and thus aren't in the Index. Heck, you would not believe how happy I was to read one character say the phrase “Fairy tales are weird”. So few people acknowledge that! Sure, a million people will talk about how the “original” fairy tales (which aren't the originals at all) are more violent, but very few people acknowledge that they're also weird as hell and seem to follow their own strange rules!

That isn't the only reason I appreciate this book. The plots are well put together and the characters are well-developed. It's also one of the more modern-minded pieces of fairy tale fiction I've encountered. At least in terms of lifestyles and identities. There are gay characters in the book. There's a trans character in the book. One of the main characters even struggles with her mental health. And it brings up those specific issues and then stops short of any that may date the book too much (for example, no mention of whoever was president during the time this was published. I think it would have been Obama).

If there were one thing I could complain about, is that despite drawing from fairy tales, it's got a very negative attitude toward them. But that's kind of understandable given the circumstances. Most stories that you'd want to read would be absolute hell to live through. I mean, I wouldn't want to live through a fairy tale anymore than I'd want to live through a horror story, space opera or western. Heck, even a romantic comedy would be annoying to live through if not fatal.

It is a very unique little book. Though, I haven't read the sequel Indexing: Reflections to know if McGuire kept it up.

The sequel to Indexing.

It was even good enough to rekindle my interest in fairy tales . . . sort of.

Yeah, even though it brought me back on here, I'm still not keen on letting myself get burnt out again. And I'm still figuring out how to keep my interests varied and balanced. So, you might see me again, but no promises as to when that might be.

Until next time (whenever that is).