The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
Jul. 27th, 2025 02:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThe Incandescent
4/5. The Director of Magic at an elite British magical boarding school deals with students, the demon-incursions that come with them, her own history, and the hot lady cop on campus.
I took this book kind of personally because (1) I have had a ‘magic school from the perspective of faculty’ book in the back of my mind for about 15 years; and (2) I literally just this year wrote a book about a wizard who is an unreliable narrator of their own life and who gets their world rocked. Tesh and I are on a wavelength, I guess. Her magic school from the perspective of faculty book is better than mine would be, for the record, since she is an actual teacher, and it really shows. The kids are great (I mean, they’re terrible and terrifying, so great) and the teaching content is great and the demons are great. Yes, sure, the demons are like three different metaphors, but they all work.
I liked this a lot. It’s one of those books that concludes a sort of story by the 50% mark, and you’re left there going ‘hmm, how is she going to undermine everything that has just happened?’ Which she does do, and I liked it. Though personally, I would have liked our protagonist’s worldview to get rocked even harder than it was. I get why this came out the way it did, but our protagonist is coming from a place of enormous privilege, and she is deeply blinkered about a lot of it, and in even deeper trauma emotional lockup, and that is a lot of stuff to unpack in a relatively slim book. And therefore some of it gets pretty short shrift, notably most of the privilege stuff and the cops-on-campus stuff. But I still found it to be satisfying.
Content notes: Demon possession, threats to young people, a past teenager death.
4/5. The Director of Magic at an elite British magical boarding school deals with students, the demon-incursions that come with them, her own history, and the hot lady cop on campus.
I took this book kind of personally because (1) I have had a ‘magic school from the perspective of faculty’ book in the back of my mind for about 15 years; and (2) I literally just this year wrote a book about a wizard who is an unreliable narrator of their own life and who gets their world rocked. Tesh and I are on a wavelength, I guess. Her magic school from the perspective of faculty book is better than mine would be, for the record, since she is an actual teacher, and it really shows. The kids are great (I mean, they’re terrible and terrifying, so great) and the teaching content is great and the demons are great. Yes, sure, the demons are like three different metaphors, but they all work.
I liked this a lot. It’s one of those books that concludes a sort of story by the 50% mark, and you’re left there going ‘hmm, how is she going to undermine everything that has just happened?’ Which she does do, and I liked it. Though personally, I would have liked our protagonist’s worldview to get rocked even harder than it was. I get why this came out the way it did, but our protagonist is coming from a place of enormous privilege, and she is deeply blinkered about a lot of it, and in even deeper trauma emotional lockup, and that is a lot of stuff to unpack in a relatively slim book. And therefore some of it gets pretty short shrift, notably most of the privilege stuff and the cops-on-campus stuff. But I still found it to be satisfying.
Content notes: Demon possession, threats to young people, a past teenager death.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-27 09:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-28 12:25 pm (UTC)Having read Some Desperate Glory--in which halfway through things Take A Turn, and the protagonist gets her worldview rocked extremely hard (she starts as a deeply oblivious teenage bully in a tiny fascist outpost of the only humans who didn't surrender when aliens destroyed the Earth), I feel like the first may be a trend and the second may be an explanation.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-28 04:54 pm (UTC)Yes, I've heard something about that, and am now interested in that book.