School for Psychics by K.C. Archer a book about students learning to work their psychic powers and knowledge of law enforcement as part of a governmental training program. We wander into a Las Vegas casino as twenty-something Teddy Cannon is trying to gamble her way out of a sticky situation. She owes her bookie thousands of dollars including money she took from her parents. However, she is banned from all casinos because security thinks she is cheating by counting cards or some other scheme so she's incognito- dressed as a middle-aged dumpy lady.
Teddy is recruited and bailed out by a big man working for the Whitfield Institute. This is where the adventure begins...
Although I usually like the premise of a school for talented kids this book wasn't for me. It wasn't because the writing was bad, it wasn't. in fact, it has a good plot well written with good visuals. I really got into the storyline. I think it was because I felt as though Teddy and her schoolmates acted much younger than their early twenties. I felt as though the book was about sex-craved, party-all-night, break all the rules high school kids and not college-aged training recruits for an undercover program. I was truly disappointed in the mischaracterization that this book is listed as Adult Fiction when it feels more Young Adult. When it comes to Teddy's psychic abilities and the struggles she goes through, then the story comes alive. Whoever wrote School of Psychic, since K.C. Archer is a pseudonym hopefully changes the way the characters interact with each other in the next book in the series so that their age is appropriately shown. I do look forward to reading the next in the series. I would like to see what happens to Teddy and her fellow trainees and teachers.

Thanks to Simon and Schuster via Netgalley for the advanced copy in lieu of my honest opinion which this review is. Give The School of Psychics a read. You might like it.

You go into every book you read hoping that it is going to be an engrossing read. It does not have to become your most favorite book ever, but you have certain expectations that the book is going to capture your attention and whisk you off to a different world. A good book leaves you satisfied. A really good book leaves you feeling like you won the book lottery. For me, School for Psychics had me feeling like it was written just for me.

Take any boarding school novel, add adult students, throw in a mystery, a government conspiracy, missing people, military training, and psychic powers and that is School for Psychics. It is so unbelievably fun. Because all of the students are over twenty, there is none of the teen angst that typically fills boarding school novels. The whole thing has a freshness about it specifically because the characters are adults and over the legal drinking age. Sex and alcohol are not the forbidden temptations they are for the underage crowd; no one is experimenting in any capacity outside of their psychic abilities. It is refreshing to be able to put aside my parenting hat and enjoy the characters.

The psychic abilities the students each exhibit are enviable, but Archer makes sure to show the downsides of superpowers. These are adults first and superheros after that, so we still have plenty of human drama to ratchet tension. Plus, as the first novel in a series, there are plenty of unanswered questions to keep you guessing. Only one of the questions left unanswered is just what the government has in mind for its psychic school graduates. (For the record, I envision a Buffy-esque type scenario like the one in Season One, Episode Eleven "Out of Sight, Out of Mind" where we last see the invisible girl in a classroom with other invisible students getting ready to learn the art of assassination and infiltration courtesy of the FBI.)

School for Psychics pretty much has everything I like in one novel and nothing I don't like. Intrigue and drama? Check. Strong female characters? Check. Decent writing? Check. A mystery and potential cover-up? Check. Superpowers? Check. I tore through this novel in one sitting and am already scouring the Internet for the release date of the second book. Objectively I know that this is not a novel that is going to be popular nor is it one I would recommend to everyone. However, if you are looking for a little fun, action-packed paranormal adventure/boarding school mystery, then this is the novel for you.

This is a great read of complex characters, great action and a wonderful plot.
I enjoyed reading this book and highly recommend it . This is the first in a debut series.
The book opens with our heroine Teddy who is a Stanford dropout,, lives in her parents garage and owes money to mobsters. She decides to go back to a Casino where she is banned and is in disguise . She has a good plan and is up to win enough to pay off a Russian mobster and return the money she has stolen from her parents . Just when she has reached her goal everything goes wrong leaving Teddy fleeing from the casino security. A stranger appears who seems to know her, and offers to help her. He then makes Teddy an offer she cannot refuse, a chance to rebuild her life, resume her education, and leave her problems behind. He claims that Teddy is not a screwed up loser but is actually a psychic, that her success with poker is not an ability to read her opponents' tells but to read their minds. Teddy decides that she has nothing to lose and so heads off to the school where she finds that nothing is what it seems. The school is private and owned by the government off the coast of San Francisco. There she meets others with unique abilities and is trained to use her abilities. to be an asset to the government. She must learn not only to be the best in her field but to work with a team while learning to be under the rule of the government to preform.
What a fascinating book ! I loved the character of Teddy and the premise of the book. The supporting characters all add to the story and the plot is never ending action. I loved it and look forward to the next in series. Thank you for the ARC which does not influence my review.

I thoroughly enjoyed School for Psychics. The main character, Teddy (Theodora) was a failed Stanford student, a failed gambler in debt to the Russians, and an adopted daughter still living in her parents’ converted garage. Saved from her Russian pursuers and the casino that had banned her for her exceptional luck in reading people at a poker table, she is saved by a man who recruits her to be a student at a school for psychics run as a collaboration between researchers, the FBI, and the government. Hoping to learn to use her newly defined psychic abilities to help at something more substantial than poker, she accepts their “scholarship” that repays her debts. Teddy is found to be profoundly talented, probably having inherited her gifts from both birth parents. This is an exciting romp with several surprises including an ending that you know will make this the first book in a series.
@netgalley @School for Psychics

Loved it. It had me hooked from the start. Teddy is a great character and I can’t wait to see where her story goes in the next one.

I absolutely loved this book - it was like The Magicians (although less angsty and depressing) meets a more grown up Harry Potter...at the police academy. I loved the characters - they were interesting and complex. The setting was unique, and the story sucked me in. This was hard to put down, and since my Kindle copy didn't show me a percentage read, I was gutted when I reached the end! I can't wait for the next book!

Teddy Cannon had always gotten in trouble with authority figures and the law in order to gamble, so the invitation to the Whitfield School For Psychics seemed like a no brainer to get out of trouble. She made friends with the Misfit group of first years, which included empaths and a pyrokinetic. It seemed to be going fairly well until little things started happening: missing students, professor offices broken into, items stolen. Teddy accepted a mission to get to the bottom of it, which soon brought everything into question.

I was sucked into the story right away, and liked Teddy a lot. Her friends at the school were also fun to get to know, though they really don't seem like the adults they're supposed to be. It could be due to the fact that the story is told largely from Teddy's point of view in a very limited third person, but it strikes me as more high school cliquey than college age students and former law enforcement agents learning to develop their skills. There is little detail on the actual psychic training, which is a little disappointing. What we do see of her classes and the exams are interesting, at least.

Getting to the part where Teddy questions the school and everything about it takes a while. The mission she accepts is actually required by the school, and it has more layers to it than originally was presented. I know that this is the first year of her schooling, so there has to be a lot of preliminary work done to outline the school and her experience. Still, I think if there was more focus on the investigations and what the school was teaching, it would have been a lot more fun to read about. The second half of the book is better put together than the first half, and not just because of the action sequences. Future installations in this series will likely have less of an issue with the set up.

Just like that I was back to school. Back in a world where magic, spells, and psychics exist. After living plenty of years imagining my Hogwarts letter would arrive, a spark of hope happened, maybe I still can go to a "spesial" school. This book cannot be compared with Harry Potter, but it gave me the same feeling I got all those years ago. The biggest difference is that this is a book written for late teens, early twenties.

Sometimes I feel like the author is struggling a little with the story, but my empathy for Teddy and the story let that go under the radar. I could not put it away, enough story were there to keep me interested and keep reading even long after my bed time.

I am so looking forward to the next semester with Teddy, in the next book.

A captivating first novel in a series, K.C. Archer introduces readers to a world of badass psychics. Teddy Cannon discovers that she has not been having seizures her whole life. She's actually been suppressing impressive psychic powers. With two strikes already, her last chance to get her life on track is to go to a School for Psychics in San Francisco. There she meets a group of unlikely friends and uncovers a deep conspiracy.

Archer's approach is definitely different. I enjoyed the complexity of the characters, their backgrounds, and there unexpected connections. However, unlike some other readers there wasn't enough use of imagination and magical moments for me to compare them to Harry Potter. I was hooked enough that I'm likely to read future books in the series just to see what happens. Thanks to Simon & Schusterand NetGalley for providing access in return for an honest review.

I am conflicted about this one. It really grabbed my interest when I glanced at the blurb, which was surprising because I don't read a lot of books like it. It's a fantasy about people with special abilities, so I thought it could go one of two ways: it could be about kids or teenagers and be a YA, or it would be about more mature characters and go darker, which I would have found refreshing. I was wrong. It is about characters in their early twenties, but they aren't very mature. They really read more like horomone-ridden teenagers. Is it a YA? There is a little bit more sexy time than is common in YA, but it's not graphic. What is it? Who wrote this? I found it to be a bit of a guilty pleasure. I enjoyed it even though I had problems with it, so I'm going with a three star rating.

Teddy has made a lot of bad decisions in her life, but she's probably at her lowest point. She's secretly stolen money from her loving parents to fund one last gambling run to pay off her HUGE debt to a very scary man. She's been banned from every casino in Las Vegas, so she's gotta do this in a disguise. Things seem to be going well... she's using her uncanny ability to read the table, she's up quite a bit of money, and she's starting to feel that elusive little feeling called hope. Then things go fuzzy and she loses everything.

Fearing for her own safety and that of her parents, a weird opportunity presents itself: a kind stranger has appeared who seems to know more about her than he should. Clint says that ability to read when people are lying she's been using can be much much more: she's psychic. He is trying to recruit her to a school for people with similar gifts where they're trained and tested and eventually go on to do very important work. We're talking saving lives here. He's willing to bail her out of the huge hole she's dug herself into if she agrees. What choice does she have?

From there, we're introduced to lots of new characters. They all have some kind of ability to hone at the school. There's one that can communicate with animals, one who gets messages from the dead, an empath hacker... and of course, the bad boy covered in tattoos who can create fire with his mind. That's right. He's literally hot... so hot he's been given the moniker Pyro. I was both rolling my eyes and amused by that one. Was it supposed to be tongue-in-cheek? I hope so. Turns out her tenure at this school is not so much guaranteed, and Teddy will have to work hard to keep her place. As if learning how to use her powers, getting in the best shape of her life, and memorizing police procedure isn't enough to manage, strange things (stranger things?) begin to happen at the academy. Missing students and lots of secrets, the school may not be what it seems.

I received a copy of this book from Net Galley and Simon & Schuster, thank you! My review is honest and unbiased.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster and Netgalley for my free copy of SCHOOL FOR PSYCHICS for review! All opinions are my own.

Okay, well this was a really fun surprise. But I have to admit I was so confused about the genre here. We’ve got a fun, (quite long!) first installation of a new series about 20-somethings recruited by the government for their psychic skills and hopefully ability to fight crime…. To me, this reads all sci-fi, all YA. But at first glance it doesn’t seem to be marketed that way, and in truth the majority of it reads this way to me. Now, there are other elements which make this kind of an amorphous genre-shifter. For example, after about the first third, it becomes a thriller-mystery of sorts. Which, was such a great surprise! But, again, an unexpected kind of shift. And honestly this is what kept me turning pages.

K.C. Archer writes with a good deal of humor. The characters are large and colorful (though some of them could stand to be fleshed out a little more clearly and less of a caricature of psychic-types – but that’s atypical for the most part). And really, the most fun thing about this was the imaginative development of the variety of psychic types out there. I expected a very Harry Potter-esque world – wizardly types (we know exactly what we’re getting with that), unexplained events, a bit of danger, but the world created here is one in which every person with psychic abilities has different powers. So, these manifest into a number of fun storylines of how these can get the characters into trouble or help them to solve certain mysteries throughout.

Something else to consider, is that though the vibe is very YA, the characters sit in the college age range and so there are some more adult themes, including a pretty illicit relationship, that’s quite fun to watch develop, but would not be appropriate in a younger setting.

All this is to say, pick it up. This is GREAT summer storm read. You will likely tear through it quickly, and though I found parts of it problematic, I will definitely be picking up the next two in the series because bottom-line? –It’s fun, and something different.

*3 words: chameleonic, goofiness, imaginative

*what I loved: what I thought “School for Psychics” would mean took me in a completely different direction than what I expected

*what I questioned: I think this series needs to streamline and decide a bit more what it wants to be.

*overall rating: 3.4 stars

** Find my bookish posts and reviews on Instagram at @mlleboaz.bibliophile !!

School for Psychics is the first book in the series. While you could read it as a standalone, it is clear from the ending that the story continues in future books. It took me a while to get into the book as the main character, Teddy, isn't easy to like. But then the other characters and the storyline sucked me in. Now, I wish more books were available in the series so I could keep on reading about them. I'm looking forward to read more about these characters.

Schools for psychics is quite interesting, although not as magical as I expected, and I found it clever and entertaining. I have become quite a fan of young adult fiction and of the theme of magic, so this book filled those requirements well enough. I’m not sure if I would classify psychicness with magic but it is a fantastical ability and done magically well in this book.
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Teddy has never really fit in and tends to have a knack for trouble which all stems from her ability to read people really well, so well she has been banned from gambling on the strip for cheating, not that they could prove it.

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Now she is in trouble with a group of gangsters and owes them a hefty sum of money. So she goes to the strip in disguise to win back the money she owes and hopes she wins not only enough to pay back Mr. Russian thug but her parents as well since to fund this expedition she took the money from their retirement account. But then things go wrong and she ends up in a car with a weird stranger telling her she is a psychic, hah!
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She decided to trust the stranger and decided to sttend a school specially designated to helping psychics harness their abilities and get them into law enforcement work, in hopes of erasing her debts and making her adoptive parents proud. She will NOT disappoint them again.

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Then if being a psychic in a school full of psychics wasn’t odd enough, then there are the break ins and missing students causing a stir in the school. At first it’s older students but then the mystery hits close to home as Teddy’s friends start getting hurt and disappearing. Apparently being psychic doesn’t work the way you and I think. 😉
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In the end, unfortunately, we are left with another mystery and a big ol’ cliffhanger. Lucky the book was good before that because I really hate a cliffhanger in a new series. Since this book just came out were looking at least a year to find out what happens next. Boo!
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So yes this book is worth the read. Yes, it’s fun and entertaining. Yes, my little booklings, I would recommend it ( but if you hate waiting to see what happens maybe don’t start the series until it has been completed).

I give this a 3.5 out of 5 stars.
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Thanks to NetGalley for offering me a chance to read and review this book .

I enjoyed this book, but it's not a tale that's "heavy" in any way. The writing's not great, but even so, I read it all the way through and wouldn't characterize it as a waste of time at all. Give it a try.

When I first started SCHOOL FOR PSYCHICS, I wanted to compare it to Lev Grossman’s THE MAGICIANS, but I’ve changed my mind. They both feature new adults who are sent back to school to learn to master their talents, but the characters in SCHOOL FOR PSYCHICS are way more likeable and realistic, and the school year structure is both satisfying and builds up to the next book.

The main character, Teddy, isn’t easy to like at first. She can read people, know when they’re bluffing, but with her powers wavering unpredictably, she’s gotten herself in serious trouble with a Vegas mob boss. She is nearly blackmailed into going to the school.

The school itself is mysterious, the teachers are harsh and the cliques brutally separated. I did enjoy that the cliques had to blend by the end, both because the teachers assigned groups but because the stakes were that high.

The woo-woo aspects of the characters’ psychic powers was kept at bay by the science and training classes the students attended. It was a great blend between mysticism and FBI procedure.

With conspiracies all around her, Teddy is never sure who to trust; her teachers, her fellow students, the mysterious stranger who promises to tell her the truth about her parents… All have their good points and manage to keep the mystery going throughout the book. Even though the book felt a bit more like a YA novel than I would have liked, I’m already looking forward to the second book.

This was a pretty fun read! It really reminded me of the show Quantico with a paranormal psychic side. The story was a little all over the place but it was pretty intriguing for the first book in a series and I'm definitely looking forward to reading the rest.

Theodora "Teddy'' Cannon is an intelligent, strong and spirited woman, but sometimes her personality just leads her down the wrong path. But really, if you can read people....really read people....see when they are lying, bluffing, etc....why not use that talent to win at gambling? Teddy doesn't care that every casino in Vegas has banned her. She just puts on a disguise, and goes anyway. She owes money to some dangerous people and then took money from her parents to help pay that loan....she has to win. Without getting noticed. But she does get noticed. Not by security. But by a representative of a school. Turns out, Teddy isn't just talented at reading people. She's psychic. The Whitfield School trains psychics for law enforcement and military programs. It's a tough place where everyone has to earn their spot. When students start disappearing, Teddy learns there is more going on behind the scenes at Whitfield than most realize. Can she and her misfit friends figure out exactly what's going on?

This was such a fun book to read! The plot is creative and entertaining. The story had me hooked quickly. Teddy makes some bad decisions, but I still really like her as a main character. She has flaws, but she's loyal to her friends. Whitfield has a lot of secrets, and Teddy is determined to find them out. This book is a great start to a series! I can't wait to find out what happens next! I will definitely be reading the next book when it comes out!

**I voluntarily read an advance readers copy of this book from Simon & Schuster via NetGalley. All opinions expressed are entirely my own.**

Teddy Cannon doesn't know why she is so good at being able to tell what someone's has for cards in poker. She doesn't realize she's psychic. She's been kicked out of college and has had several run ins with the law. Then, one night in Vegas she meets someone who tells her about her psychic ability and offers to help her wipe her slate clean (including paying her adopted parent's retirement plan back) if she comes to a school for people with special abilities like hers. She meets several other people her age and begins to make friends. Then, she starts finding out bits of information about her birth parents. Her desire to find out more about them puts her friends at risk. I enjoyed this book. It was one of the books that I didn't want to stop reading at night. I would look at the clock and it would be 3 in the morning and I still would think I could read just a few more pages. I can't wait for the rest of the books in the series to come out!

We follow a snarky millennial protagonist with a gambling problem as she learns to use her psychic abilities (it's why she's so good at poker) at a secret government school in San Francisco. The protagonist has a lot of baggage to work through, but she does good job of growing as a person as well as learning how to open herself up emotionally. It's fun to be inside her head throughout the story.

The plot clips right along, with fairly straightforward prose and no particularly surprising twists. The "big twist" was telegraphed from so early in the story I still haven't decided whether it was a little clumsy or it was meant to be another way to show that Teddy has been trusting people more than she ever used to.

The underlying conflict revolves around a pretty interesting discussion about morality and safety, which I liked, and I'm looking forward to seeing that theme explored more thoroughly in the sequel.

Folks who enjoy The Magicians should definitely pick this up. It's great for anyone looking for magic school stories, for urban fantasy that isn't explicitly about solving mysteries, and for really solid depictions of young people with complex friendships.