Indexing: Reflections, Episode 3: Brotherly Love by Seanan McGuire

Indexing: Reflections, Episode Three: Brotherly Love

by Seanan McGuire
Series: Indexing, #2.3
Kindle
47North, 2015
Read: September 8, 2015

Now this is what I’m talking about. A solid, solid entry. We get Henry’s brother back; we get a good, contained story — yet with serialized elements that we’ll see play out; we see fallout from Episode 2; and thanks to Elsie’s particular brand of magic, we — and the characters — see something new.

There’s an incursion near the school where Henry’s brother, Gerry, teaches. Thankfully, it has nothing to do with him, it’s just near him. It’s also near his school, and the children in it — children who, it should be said, are the primary targets of the incursion. So Henry and her team are dispatched to wrangle with the press, school administration, and whoever — or whatever — is out there wanting to snack on kids.

The solution to this comes a bit easily, but the challenge to this episode isn’t solving eh narrative incursion, it’s in figuring out just what’s going on — how this is the result of Elsie’s escape — and then trying to see what the impact is going to be on Henry’s team (the stress on Demi and Henry this episode in particular). We don’t see Elsie at all — just what she’s done, but that’s enough.

Other than the ending coming a page or two earlier than I’d expected, I thought this one worked pretty well. We’ve only had 15 episodes of this series, and already McGuire is playing with the conventions, I like that. Some people would wait until the third book to mess with things like this, but why wait? Go for it while you can. Especially if you can tell good stories while re-writing your own rules, and that’s exactly what McGuire has done here.

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