The Incandescent

by Emily Tesh

Synopsis:

Dr 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, 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 demons are masters of manipulation. It's her responsibility to keep her school with its six hundred students and centuries-old legacy safe. But it's possible the entity Walden most needs to keep her school safe from... is herself.

Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent features an old and storied boarding school for magic in Britain, from the point of view of the teachers. While “British magic school” calls up certain associations, it’s more rooted in the modern British school system, and plagued by familiar British problems (like part of the student housing being built from now-crumbling concrete). It accepts the fact that you can’t only teach magic, with the school being staffed by teachers of maths and English as well. All in all, it’s better thought through than the books you might be comparing it to.

I did love seeing it all through the eyes of a teacher, and it’s fascinating how we clearly see that Walden’s a good teacher who cares deeply about her pupils, and has a deep flaw of arrogance and snobbery running through her that gives her a weakness at certain critical moments, and with certain characters. It doesn’t mean she can’t be a good teacher to a motherless child of poor background, but we see her having to work for it, and it makes the character building all the richer (even as it is sometimes not very likeable).

There was however one aspect of this which made me literally put the book down in disgust, and that’s when Walden misses something staggeringly obvious. Even with all her human flaws, even if she wasn’t going to jump right away to “the guy I’m sleeping with has an agenda, and that agenda is directly served by sleeping with me”, she should’ve done some basic obvious security checks right after discovering a certain breach. The way the “twist” unfolded threw me out of the story in a way I found it almost impossible to forgive.

Until that point, I’d have given it a 5/5 rating, but I was honestly tempted to drop it down to 3/5 for that alone. People can be blind, susceptible to flattery, yes. But Walden’s not supposed to be stupid, and she should have already been on her guard given other events.

I did figure out other things ahead of time as well, but none that felt so baldly obvious and infuriating; mostly, I thought it was well put together and a world I enjoyed spending time in. But just that one aspect — arrghhhhh!

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)