https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-83502-X.html
Review: The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh
Publisher: |
Tor |
Copyright: |
2025 |
ISBN: |
1-250-83502-X |
Format: |
Kindle |
Pages: |
417 |
The Incandescent is a stand-alone magical boarding school fantasy.
Your students forgot you. It was natural for them to forget you. You
were a brief cameo in their lives, a walk-on character from the
prologue. For every sentimental my teacher changed my life
story you heard, there were dozens of my teacher made me
moderately bored a few times a week and then I got through the year
and moved on with my life and never thought about them again.
They forgot you. But you did not forget them.
Doctor Saffy Walden is Director of Magic at Chetwood, an elite boarding
school for prospective British magicians. She has a collection of
impressive degrees in academic magic, a specialization in demonic
invocation, and a history of vague but lucrative government job offers
that go with that specialty. She turned them down to be a teacher, and
although she's now in a mostly administrative position, she's a good
teacher, with the usual crop of promising, lazy, irritating, and nervous
students.
As the story opens, Walden's primary problem is Nikki Conway. Or, rather,
Walden's primary problem is protecting Nikki Conway from the Marshals, and
the infuriating Laura Kenning in particular.
When Nikki was seven, she summoned a demon who killed her entire family
and left her a ward of the school. To Laura Kenning, that makes her a risk
who should ideally be kept far away from invocation. To Walden, that makes
Nikki a prodigious natural talent who is developing into a brilliant
student and who needs careful, professional training before she's tempted
into trying to learn on her own.
Most novels with this setup would become Nikki's story. This one does not.
The Incandescent is Walden's story.
There have been a lot of young-adult magical boarding school novels since
Harry Potter became a mass phenomenon, but most of them focus on
the students and the inevitable coming-of-age story. This is a story about
the teachers: the paperwork, the faculty meetings, the funding challenges,
the students who repeat in endless variations, and the frustrations and
joys of attempting to grab the interest of a young mind. It's also about
the temptation of higher-paying, higher-status, and less ethical work,
which however firmly dismissed still nibbles around the edges.
Even if you didn't know Emily Tesh is herself a teacher, you would guess
that before you get far into this novel. There is a vividness and a depth
of characterization that comes from being deeply immersed in the nuance
and tedium of the life that your characters are living. Walden's
exasperated fondness for her students was the emotional backbone of this
book for me. She likes teenagers without idealizing the process of
being a teenager, which I think is harder to pull off in a novel than it
sounds.
It was hard to quantify the difference between a merely very
intelligent student and a brilliant one. It didn't show up in a list
of exam results. Sometimes, in fact, brilliance could be a
disadvantage — when all you needed to do was neatly jump the hoop of
an examiner's grading rubric without ever asking why. It was the
teachers who knew, the teachers who could feel the difference. A few
times in your career, you would have the privilege of teaching someone
truly remarkable; someone who was hard work to teach because they made
you work harder, who asked you questions that had never
occurred to you before, who stretched you to the very edge of your own
abilities. If you were lucky — as Walden, this time, had been lucky —
your remarkable student's chief interest was in your discipline: and
then you could have the extraordinary, humbling experience of teaching
a child whom you knew would one day totally surpass you.
I also loved the world-building, and I say this as someone who is
generally not a fan of demons. The demons themselves are a bit of a
disappointment and mostly hew to one of the stock demon conventions, but
the rest of the magic system is deep enough to have practitioners who
approach it from different angles and meaty enough to have some satisfying
layered complexity. This is magic, not magical science, so don't expect a
fully fleshed-out set of laws, but the magical system felt substantial and
satisfying to me.
Tesh's first novel, Some Desperate
Glory, was by far my favorite science fiction novel of 2023. This is a
much different book, which says good things about Tesh's range and the
potential of her work yet to come: adult rather than YA, fantasy rather
than science fiction, restrained and subtle in places where Some
Desperate Glory was forceful and pointed. One thing the books do have in
common, though, is some structure, particularly the false climax near the
midpoint of the book. I like the feeling of uncertainty and possibility
that gives both books, but in the case of The Incandescent, I was
not quite in the mood for the second half of the story.
My problem with this book is more of a reader preference than an objective
critique: I was in the mood for a story about a confident, capable
protagonist who was being underestimated, and Tesh was writing a novel
with a more complicated and fraught emotional arc. (I'm being
intentionally vague to avoid spoilers.) There's nothing wrong with the
story that Tesh wanted to tell, and I admire the skill with which she did
it, but I got a tight feeling in my stomach when I realized where she was
going. There is a satisfying ending, and I'm still very happy I read this
book, but be warned that this might not be the novel to read if you're in
the mood for a purer competence porn experience.
Recommended, and I am once again eagerly awaiting the next thing Emily
Tesh writes (and reminding myself to go back and read her novellas).
Content warnings: Grievous physical harm, mind control, and some body
horror.
Rating: 8 out of 10
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-83502-X.html