**Thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for the ARC with the understanding that any review provided will be my honest opinion of the book.**



The description of this book had me hooked but the story itself kept me hooked. Teddy, a woman in her 20s, is trying to win at least $200,000 at a card table in a Vegas casino when her life changes forever. She has always been different from others but she knew it wasn't because she was special. Teddy was wrong. She always thought of herself as a human lie detector but she is actually psychic. She gets an offer she can't refuse to attend The Whitefield School in exchange for clearing her debts with a pretty nasty loan shark. Teddy soon realizes that there are so many others that have special abilities like hers and for the first time in her life, she feels like she belongs.

This book was reminded me of the X-Men a bit and that works. I really liked reading this story and would absolutely read any more that were part of the series. It moves at a really good pace and I loved, loved, loved that the characters were NOT teenagers. The only reason I didn't give 5 stars is because I don't like the cover.

Take a group of twenty-something psychics at a sequestered school off the coast of San Francisco trying to learn how to control/master their special gifts for the greater good, add drama, irreverence, intrigue, conspiracy, and a little personal growth, and you end up with an entertaining, sometimes funny, stay-up-all-night read. I really enjoyed this. Can't wait for the next book in the series!

School for Psychics has an interesting premise...a school run by the federal government to assist psychics in honing their skills. The only reason to do that, of course, is to then place them in federal agencies, such as the FBI or CIA, where they can assist their fellow Gmen with their paranormal prowess. I found the main character difficult to like...a bit prickly and paranoid. While there were times in the middle of the book I wished the author would get on with it, the end wrapped up quite suddenly with a somewhat difficult to follow idea that leads directly into a second novel (or series). It was a quick, interesting read, but won't be on any "must read" shelves.

I enjoyed this story more than I thought I would. I was initially a little iffy from the synopsis but thought I would still give it a shot. Despite enjoying it for the most part, I just couldn't really connect with the characters. Hopefully any future books could improve upon the characters and the premise more.

It's nice to read a paranormal book that isn't targeted for Teens. Teddy has psychic abilities she just doesn't know it yet. Teddy lost her parents at a young age and had a difficult life, she always seems to sabotage herself, despite having great adoptive parents she just can't get her act together. But she does have a gift she calls her human lie detector. She uses it for gambling and gets herself in trouble with a loan shark and the law and after losing money she stole from her adoptive parents she finds out she can has psychic abilities and if she agrees to join a special law enforcement training team and go to school to strengthen her gift, the government will solve all her money problems and give her a fresh start. When Teddy goes to school she meets other students with different psychic abilities, they are split into two groups the alphas and the misfits (as they call themselves) People that can talk to animals, start fires, empaths, mind readers etc. She starts to accept her gift until she learns things aren't always what they seem. The death of her parents, and the motives of some of the students or teachers. Students start to go missing and dangerous things start happening and it's time for the students to band together and try to figure out what is going on and how to stop it.. I liked the book and the characters but I think there needs to be a bit more mystery, some of the clues dropped were pretty obvious and sometimes the science of it all got a bit intense But I look forward to seeing how the characters develop and Teddy's relationship with FBI agent Nick and finding a person that she thought was lost to her forever. I will keep reading this series. I see a lot of potential here. I was given this book in advance for my honest review.

School for Psychics reminds me of X-Men in that they teach people how to deal with and control their extraordinary capabilities. As with any power there are responsibilities and those who wish to corrupt and/or destroy said power.
I really enjoyed the character of Teddy. I wish more background material had been given about some of her friends, like Jillian and Dara. I liked how it had just enough action to keep it lively but didn't depend on that to fulfill the story. The moral dilemmas in the story are ones that plague everyone. The development of trust for Teddy was interesting because of who she trusted as the story moved on versus who she claimed to care about the most. It was also nice that while there was some romance but it didn't define the book or its characters.
I received a copy of this book and am voluntarily leaving this review.

2.5 stars. Theodora “Teddy” Cannon is hiding her short black hair and slight build under a long blonde wig, weighted underwear that adds thirty pounds, and cheap flashy clothing. It’s all in an effort to fool the security personnel and facial recognition software at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. There she plans to parlay her $5,000 bankroll (from selling her car) into enough money to pay back the $270,000 she owes to Sergei Zharkov, a vicious Vegas bookie, and her adoptive parents, who know Teddy has been living an aimless and trouble-strewn life but are unaware that she’s stolen $90,000 from their retirement account to make a partial payment to Zharkov. Teddy knows she has the talent to “read” other card players almost faultlessly ― it’s led to her being banned from all the casinos on the Strip ― and is confident that she can win big at Texas Hold ’Em if she isn’t spotted and kicked out. Her plan is working like a dream … until her talent suddenly abandons her in the middle of a crucial hand and she loses everything.

About that same time both Zharkov and the casino recognize Teddy ― apparently bad luck comes in threes ― and give chase. Teddy is mysteriously saved by a stranger, an NFL linebacker-sized man who springs several surprises on her: He knows who she is and how much money she owes, and to whom. Her ability to read other gamblers is actually a psychic ability. And he will pay back all her debts if she will come to the Whitfield Institute for Law Enforcement Training and Development, which is secretly a school for training psychically-gifted young adults.

Teddy is a rebel and a rule-breaker, but she’s smart enough to recognize a deal that shouldn’t be refused. A day and a plane and boat ride later, she’s at the Whitfield Institute on an island off the California coast, meeting other new students with a wide range of psychic gifts, from telepathy to animal-speaking to firestarting. So far so fun, but Teddy is also a loner with trust issues and has a hard time fitting in, especially when it becomes clear that she’s having difficulty getting a handle on her psychic gifts.

Stir in a hostile professor with a grudge against Teddy and the “Misfits” group she hangs out with, a couple of hot guys who are interested in Teddy, a conspiracy and a few mysteries, and you’ve got a breezy, fast-paced story that reads quickly. Unfortunately School for Psychics never really engaged me, for numerous reasons. The plot is somewhat choppy, occasionally skipping over periods of time or important events with a noticeable lack of subtlety or smoothness and glossing over elements that don’t really make sense (for example, how did Teddy manage to land herself almost $300,000 in debt when she had a near-infallible talent for gambling?). It’s also cliché-ridden, relying on over-familiar tropes like the misfits vs. the alphas and the main character who, initially at a daunting disadvantage talent-wise, develops ― surprise! ― an Extra-Special Super Cool Talent.

The characters are mostly one-dimensional and familiar types. Teddy, though more complex, isn’t particularly likable, though readers who appreciate rebellious and troubled protagonists may enjoy her more than I did. School for Psychics has a New Adult vibe (with no interest in a committed relationship, Teddy hops into bed with a couple of different guys) but the students at the Whitfield Institute act more like teenagers. It irritated me as a reader when Teddy and her friends made several poor decisions. In particular, there’s one mind-bogglingly bad decision toward the end that annoyed me so much that I couldn’t even make myself be interested in the details of how their caper went down. The far-fetched coincidences that enabled their scheme didn’t help. I skimmed through most of what was supposed to be a climactic scene, mentally rolling my eyes at the characters.

School for Psychics works reasonably well as the introduction for a new book series, if the concept interests you and if you don’t expect too much from it beyond set-up and character introduction. Reportedly the television rights to it have been purchased and the CW is now developing a drama based on this novel.

School for Psychics is the first in an eponymous series about a public-private venture in educating psychics for work in law enforcement and national defense. Teddy Cannon is a college dropout deeply in debt to her bookie and in order to get out from under, she’s stolen money from her parents’ retirement, planning to win big at The Bellagio. By big, I mean a quarter million bucks just to get back to zero. However, she’s confident she can succeed if she can just avoid detection. She’s permanently banned from the Strip because she is an uncanny gambler. They think she cheats. She thinks she’s just good at reading people.

However, her plans go awry, deliberately spiked by the Dean of the School for Psychics who used her dilemma to recruit her to the school. Not having much of a choice and perhaps hoping she can make something of herself, she agrees to attend, and there begins a whole new adventure, making friends, learning skills, and even learning about her birth parents who died in an accident when she was a child.



It’s a funny thing. In television, the pilot is often terrible with people spending far too much time explaining who they are in odd little monologues or awkward, never-gonna-happen dialogue. In books, the first in a series is often the best, rich in character development and without those silly meet-and-catch up gatherings that infect subsequent books. It’s a function of their media. The time from book to book is enough to make writers think we need a refresher or that we want to know what some character not featured in the current book is up to. I mention this because this book reads more like a pilot. There’s a lot of character introduction and somehow I think the next books in the series will be more exciting.

I like Teddy. I think the premise is promising and there are so many great elements for further stories, but this one, rooted in her first year of study was a bit too…studious, I guess. Archer makes the mistake of thinking there is some need to root the paranormal in science, so there’s quantum physics used to explain Neo and the bullets in The Matrix and neural-imaging and biology to explain psychic phenomenon. This is the stuff she is learning in class. I guess it’s my thinking that if you are going to gift characters with paranormal powers, then just do it. Maybe a sentence or two on origins, not long explanations of how this is scientifically feasible, especially when those particular explanations are questionable science.

Hopefully, her classes in her sophomore year will be more about her powers and less about trying to pretend this isn’t fantasy.

I received an e-galley of School for Psychics from the publisher through NetGalley.

School for Psychics at Simon & Schuster
K. C. Archer is a pseudonym. K.C. Archer at Goodreads.

I am fascinated by any book with "powers" featured in the plotline. Growing up, I loved the idea of harnessing a secret power just like Samantha from Bewitched! School for Psychics is about an elite, most secretive school on Angel Island helping psychics learn their respective gifts. The first book in a new series, this one left us on part of a cliffhanger, so that you are encouraged to pick up the next book to find out what happens next.

Teddy Cannon is our protagonist, she's discovered reading cards at a Poker table in a Vegas casino and we follow her as she comes to terms with her birth parents and their history, along with all her new friends at school. They all have different psychic abilities and it was super interesting to learn more about the differences. However, this book was a slog for me for about the first 2/3's of the book. I didn't want to pick it back up again, wasn't interested in the plot or the characters, frankly I was just bored. The last 1/3 I couldn't put down. It was a riveting race to the end and I had to know how it would end. Not sure yet if I'll pick up the next book in the series. I think there were just too many side characters that I had a hard time keeping them all straight.

School for Psychics is similar to other “magic school” stories I’ve read, although in this case the students don’t learn magic but rather how to control their natural psychic abilities.

Teddy Cannon is living a life without purpose. At 24, she’s been kicked out of college, she can’t keep a job, and she doesn’t really have any friends. Her one talent is gambling, because she always knows when other people are lying. However, now she is $250,000 in debt to a loan shark. When a mysterious man offers to take care of her debts in exchange for attending a school that will hone her psychic talents for public service, she doesn’t feel like she has any choice but to agree.

Teddy struggles to adjust to life at the Whitfield Institute, having trouble with developing her powers as well as trusting the other students she’s been partnered with to have her back. It doesn’t help that mysterious things are happening at the school, like students disappearing without explanation from the campus. When she learns that the man who recruited her has information about her past that he’s kept secret, Teddy and her friends decide to use their new skills to try to clear up some of the mysteries surrounding them.

As in other books featuring mystical schools, a lot of the story involves Teddy attending classes and trying to learn how to master her abilities. That’s not to say there’s no action, but it’s mostly concentrated toward the end of the novel. Given the ending, I expect there will be more opportunities for Teddy to use her growing psychic talents in later books in the series, though.

The plot does include a potential love triangle, which some readers may find annoying. There’s a handsome FBI agent named Nick, who also happens to be Teddy’s teacher, as well as a hot (literally) fellow student nicknamed Pyro for his ability to start fires with his mind. However, Teddy doesn’t spend the entire book angsting over them like the characters in some novels, which made the presence of two possible romantic leads more tolerable to me.

I enjoyed the book enough that I zoomed through it quickly. I'd recommend it for readers who enjoy fantasy novels featuring school settings and coming of age stories.

A copy of this book was provided through NetGalley for review; all opinions expressed are my own.

I'm ready for the next book. Teddy and the other Misfits are great characters.

As I was reading, I continuously forgot they are all in their mid- to late- twenties. This story reads like it would be an intriguing YA book with the students being in high school.

I love the abilities everyone has and wish I had a bit of their powers for myself.

Things are confusing at the core even if you think you've got it figured out. Not everything is as it seems on the surface.

If you like a bit of paranormal, give this book a chance. I don't think you'd regret it!

Sadly I found nothing special about this book. The blurb made it sound interesting, but I found myself just being bored with the book, and the main character wasn't particularly likeable. All in all disappointed.

3.5 stars. Touted as the "Harry Potter for adults," I had a hard time getting into this one, but once the characters and plot were established, the action picked up. I enjoyed the last quarter of the book more than the rest, and I think subsequent books will be better now that I know all those pesky details. I do hope they change the cover, though.

Book started out slow but after the first couple of chapters I really enjoyed Teddy's story. Can't wait for book two to come out.

I don't have to be psychic to hear you groaning about yet another book set in a school for extraordinarily talented young people. Yes, it is an overused plot device...and the reason is because it works so well. (As evidence, the fabulously successful Harry Potter series.)

In this first offering in a proposed new series being written by author K.C. Archer (and who the heck IS K.C. Archer??), the main character is twenty-two-year-old Theodora "Teddy" Cannon, a Stanford dropout who lives in the garage apartment belonging to her adoptive parents in Las Vegas, NV. Teddy has a severe gambling problem and is hugely in debt to a scary Russian loan shark AND she has been banned from most of the casinos. Her skill? She can 'read' other players, knowing when they are faking a good hand.

On this night, she is disguised and making one last attempt to make a big killing at the poker tables when she blows it all, is spotted by security, but is ambushed/rescued by a man claiming to be an FBI agent, offering her a position at Whitfield Institute in San Francisco, where her psychic talents can be developed and perhaps put to use to help her country.

After a night of soul-searching, Teddy is on the plane to SF the next morning and takes a ferry to the school on Angel Island, where she meets a band of fellow 'misfits.'

Through the first semester, things are pretty much as the reader would expect from this trope: personality clashes, problems with instructors, cliques, flashes of extraordinary ability, with a healthy dash of sexuality thrown in. Teddy lives up to her last name, being a bit of a 'loose cannon.'

But as semester two kicks off, the students are offered an opportunity to work on an FBI murder case to try to prove the innocence of a convicted killer. The twelve remaining first-year students are divided into two groups: "Each group will get the same information, but essentially, it's a race against the clock--and each other--to find anything we missed and make sure justice is done." (Boy, does this sound like The Innocence Project at Northwestern University or what??)

While visiting the inmate at San Quentin prison, Teddy has an unexpected connection with another prisoner who gives her some unsettling personal information and sends her life in a different and possibly dangerous direction. With this turn of events, the book becomes a real page turner.

Knowing there is a series in the works, I was worried there might be a cliffhanger-type ending. Well, there are some ends left dangling and there's a bit of a final teaser, but this first book does reach a satisfying conclusion.

Teddy is an interesting, resourceful character who does grow as a person and learns from her mistakes. The 'bad guy' was fairly easy to spot, even for a non-psychic. :) The plot falls somewhere between ya and adult fiction, with the writing style leaning towards ya and the subject matter occasionally verging into adult territory with some sexuality.

Many thanks to Dana Trocker, Associate Director of Marketing @Simon & Schuster, Inc. for offering me the opportunity to read an arc of this new thriller through NetGalley. I will look forward to reading more in this series.

School for Psychics begins with Teddy getting into the Bellagio casino after being banned from every casino on the Las Vegas Strip. She's in deep with a Serbian loan shark named Sergei and needs over $200,000. Using her ability to read people, it should be easy, but something goes wrong and she finds casino security and Sergei closing in on her. All of a sudden, she's whisked around a corner by Clint, an African American ex-cop, who tells her he's a fellow psychic here to recruit her to the Whitfield Institute for Law Enforcement Training and Development.

This whole opening scene, with Teddy talking about how she was beating the facial recognition system and how she was reading the other card players, was interesting and I quite liked it. However, once things started going south and Clint was introduced, I thought things went far too easily. It felt like Clint should have been using his psychic power to make Teddy go along with what he was saying because so was so compliant. I wouldn't have approved of it, but it would have been some kind of explanation for why she was so blase about his "I'm saving you from a loan shark by recruiting you to a psychic training school" shtick.

There was nothing about Teddy that made me think she would so easily go along with this explanation with next to no skepticism, almost no protestation. Her desperation for money and parental protection was one thing, but I don't think it negated how easily she accepted being told she's psychic, Clint's psychic, and there's a whole school training psychics to be in all arms of law enforcement. It's like how I imagine a person would react if psychics were really commonplace and it was a bland subject, nothing too special anymore. Magic powers, such as they were here, didn't have any of the specialness that they should have had considering the world they were set in.

It was actually kind of hard to like Teddy. It's not that she was overly hard edged or cruel or anything or that nature; she was just so one dimensional that I didn't get a real sense of personality from her. While reading, it didn't feel like much effort had been put into developing her as a character, which was a real shame because her's was the perspective we were getting the whole story from.

The plot felt like it was full of promise. A school for psychics that are inserted into the government at all levels? That could have been so cool. As I was reading, I got strong X-men vibes, especially with the various powers that were called psychic but could just as easily have been mutant abilities. That with the school setting, the military hanging around, the code names like Pyro, the similarities kept coming.

There was a lot of establishing time where Teddy and the others were being trained in tactical skills that was, frankly, dull. There were classes in seerology that got a bit technical manual speak for me and then some painfully slow chapters to pass the time until midterms.

All the while I kept thinking, all this time spent training psychic people and not one has ever gone rogue? Could one possibly show up and attack to make things interesting? Even setting aside the non-disclosure agreement the students sign and the mysterious punishments for breaking it, what about the psychics that don't go to Whitfield? They don't try to rise up and protest the government controlling their fellow powered people? By the time even a hint about this even makes sense, by the time there's a whisper, the book is practically done and I just don't care anymore. The pacing and plot development was all wrong for whatever kind of impact might have made this an enjoyable book. As it it stands, this book managed to take all the fun out of having powers.

Along the same lines as wondering why no psychics seemed to rise up or go rogue or anything of the sort was what happens to the students that get kicked out of Whitfield? What about the ones that don't make it in? The ones that don't have the physical abilities the school requires? None of that seems to get addressed.

Everyone in the book is either fit when they get to the school, having been recruited from the police academy or similar, or they're next to perfect within a couple of months. I find it highly unlikely that there are no psychics with disabilities or that can't run SWAT team obstacle courses and with that comes the question, what happens to them and the reject students? It's like casting out students with the possibility for severe mental illness (see: Teddy's 'epilepsy') and forgetting about them. That's cruel.

One of things I found most confusing about School for Psychics that didn't have to do with the story itself is how the reader is supposed to regard this book with relation to its genre. Who is this book for? Who is it being marketed towards? If I'm to go by the genres listed under its Amazon page, then it would be fantasy, fiction, paranormal. If I go by the shelve names people have used on Goodreads, young adult might pop up there too. After reading the book myself, I have to say that K.C. Archer's book does not have a clear identity.

The story itself, the ages of the characters, the situations they're in, these are things I'd expect in a new adult/adult novel at the very least. Teddy herself is twenty-four years old, so young adult isn't accurate. However, her mannerisms and the those of the other students (Molly, Jillian, Pyro, etc.) at Whitfield were much more in line with what I would expect to see in characters that are six to ten years younger. It's like the author wrote a young adult novel and then aged everyone up a few years for some reason? It's an odd situation that will, I think, cause confusion among people that are strictly fans of either young adult or adult fiction and aren't fans of books that muddy the waters.

There's a certain expectation I had going into School for Psychics based on the summary and it did nothing to live up to it's promises. Boring execution, plot threads that unraveled the closer you looked at them, a story that made super powers mind numbingly dull, and a cast that I couldn't wait to say goodbye to add up to a book I will not be recommending to anyone.

Imagine, if you will, the absurdly unlikely but highly entertaining hijinks of the TV show Quantico starring a Jessica Jones type, where all the cast have mental superpowers. That is the fun romp that is K. C. Archer's School For Psychics, in this case the Whitfield Institute to which our heroine, the wisecracking, damaged Teddy Cannon, is recruited after being banned from every casino on the Vegas strip. Teddy has always been able to read people in a fashion that has pretty much caused her to isolate herself from everyone except her beloved adoptive parents. She parlays this skill, however, into profits at the poker tables, to the chagrin of the casinos who ban her before she can finish paying back the stakes she owes a Serbian mobster (in what was the weakest part of the narrative to me, the fact that she didn't sock aside money from her winnings, the hallmark of a gambling addict, but otherwise never displayed any other symptoms of addiction once she'd left Vegas.)

Anyway, the Whitfield Institute trains psychics for placement with law enforcement agencies, and Teddy is eager to take the opportunity to make something of her life after flaming out of Stanford. She joins an assortment of 20-somethings who each have their own set of skills and secrets, and begins a rigorous training program at the secluded island campus. But when a routine assignment reveals that her mentor may be the very antithesis of everything he's taught her, and that the riddle of her own mysterious past may not be as unsolvable as it seems, Teddy finds herself and her friends in great danger as they race to uncover a truth that seems to be coming for them whether they like it or not.

This was a super fun book that felt like it would make for a great TV show. The paranormal "science" wasn't the most rigorous even for that field of study but it was less insulting than some of the pseudoscience that peppers a lot of mainstream entertainment today, so the lack of precision didn't spoil my experience at all. I also really enjoyed watching Teddy's character grow and learn from her time at Whitfield, even if I'm more #TeamLucas than Nick. I'm excited to see where K. C. Archer goes with this series (and hope that Teddy doesn't go the route of Season 2 Jessica Jones, who is high on a cocktail of self-pity and narcissism that is growing increasingly hard to watch.)

School for Psychics is a fast-paced read that is a little bit conspiracy mixed with some mystery and a touch of possible romance. We have a group of misfits with special abilities thrown together at a school designed to help them hone those abilities and make them into crime fighters. All of this should've had me in its clutches from the start. Sadly, the actual story didn't even come close. Our main character, Teddy, is unlikable from the start, then we have the rest of her classmates, who aren't much better. I realize that with a series, there is time to stretch out world and character building, but this group of misfits are almost interchangeable. They're all at this school as a last resort - not because they want to be, but because they don't have any other choices. Instead of making the most of a last chance opportunity, they continue to break the rules and don't seem to learn from their mistakes. I expected young adult, but this bunch of twenty somethings act more like hormone driven high school students. All of this combined to make for a story that just didn't pull me in and make me want to keep reading.

I received a free copy of this book from the author. I had the opportunity to review or not.

Teddy, an irascible young 24-year-old, is in big trouble. She is in debt to some very nasty people, she has stolen money from her parents and she is sitting at a poker table in a Las Vegas casino from which she has been banned due to her ability to win. But, instead of winning, she has just lost the stolen bankroll she hoped would finance her way out of trouble. Just when she is beginning to despair all as lost, a stranger who has been eyeing her all evening steps in. He offers her a way out, but she must make up her mind quickly.

Uncertain of what her future could be, Teddy chooses to take the stranger up on his offer and heads off to a school for psychics. Here she will be taught how to control her psychic powers, which she didn’t even realize she possessed.

She finds that life isn’t easy at school either. She must prove herself often, pass exams, run obstacle courses, and become part of a team. The most difficult part for her. She has never really trusted anyone and to trust strangers is simply beyond her ability. Until she realizes that she will never accomplish her goals unless she learns to trust someone. Teddy grows with the help of her teammates when things go off kilter including missing classmates, unsettled friends, and secretive teachers. Teddy gets caught up in a dangerous game when the missing classmates show up intent on killing her savior and destroying the school. Her abilities and skills are put to the test as she tries to stop the destroyers.

This is a page-turner. An up all-nighter. The characters are well-developed, strong and likable. The plot is exciting with twists and turns. I highly recommend this book and look forward to any and all sequels.