Review: The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
A Deadly Education meets Plain Bad Heroines in this sapphic dark academia fantasy from bestselling author Emily Tesh, winner of the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.
Doctor Walden is the Director of Magic at Chetwood School and one of the most powerful magicians in England. Her days consist of meetings, teaching A-Level Invocation to four talented and chaotic sixth formers, more meetings, and securing the school’s boundaries from demonic incursions.
Walden is good at her job—no, Walden is great at her job. But when a new threat arises in the form of the ancient demon who has long waited patiently just beyond the school’s wards, even Walden and the aggressively competent Chief Marshal, Laura Kenning, may not be able to contain it.
It’s Walden’s responsibility to keep her school with its six hundred students and centuries-old legacy safe. And it’s possible the entity Walden most needs to keep her school safe from—is herself.
At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Review:
Dear Emily Tesh,
Amazon recommended this book to me and I was very intrigued, but because your other book did not work too well for me, I was not ready to pay $14.99 and ordered it from the library. Readers, I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I do suggest at least glancing at the negative reviews at Goodreads prior to making a purchasing decision, because the reviews actually vary and readers have a lot of different gripes.
So to me what this book was – a magical boarding school from the point of view of one of the teachers. Moreover, while there is magic and a magic system in the story and acts of magic and some magical beings (specifically demons) play important role in the plot, the Chetwood School is first and foremost a boarding school in modern England and a lot of things that happen are things that presumably can happen in any modern boarding school in England. I say presumably because despite reading a lot of fiction featuring Boarding schools in England (both magical and not), I do not consider myself an expert on how British education works.
For example, I of course have heard and read about A–Levels and in this book as the blurb tells you doctor Walden teaches A-Level Invocation (demons summoning) to four students. She is mostly an administrator and she deals with meetings, with checking on other teachers, with school bureaucracy basically, with the School Board but she is also a wonderful teacher and Sixth Form students were one of the few (I believe the only class in the year described in the book) that she taught regularly. I had no idea what Sixth Form was and I had no idea that Year Thirteen is the last year in British School Education? Live and learn I say.
I also want to give the author huge props for knowing the education field really well. She either did a huge amount of research or taught/ teaches herself, because everyday chores of teachers are written with a very competent hand and in great detail. One of the reasons I did not grade this book higher than B is that sometimes those details bored me. I want to stress the word *sometimes* here please, mostly I enjoyed doctor Walden’s journey a lot, even her day to day tasks.
But there are demons in the school and demons are very dangerous creatures and our main character had/has to deal with them a lot and it could be very dangerous and no, I won’t tell you more details. What I will tell you is that the blurb references “A Deadly Education” and for once I find the citing of another book as something that this book may remind you of appropriate. Thank goodness though that it may just remind you of that. Because I *hated* “A Deadly Education”, especially the first book of it. I guess I will share a vague spoiler –
Spoiler: Show
Our main character is someone who had experienced some trauma in her youth and never quite worked through it. She is a flawed character, but I really liked her. I appreciated the teacher, who despite becoming one of the administrators still loved teaching and loved kids despite thinking that she could not connect with them on the personal level. Again, this is a book about her, kids are secondary characters, even if I found the foursome she taught quite sympathetic and likable and most importantly at the end of the book in the small but significant way we saw that they learned a lot.
The sapphic element in the book I would argue is significant, but only in a sense that the characters have crushes on one another. They really do not spend all that much time together on page and the potential relationship that they were going to try out is supposed to start after the book ends. Also one of them is bi and she spends some time having sex with a guy. No one is cheating, basically characters acknowledge feelings and then part ways in a sense and then the guy comes to the scene. So do not expect full blown f/f romance here, basically we won’t see it.
Grade: B
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