This was really fantastic. The Incandescent is a book that takes its time but does so in a confident and engaging manner--I was thoroughly engrossed in the theoretical discussions of demons, teaching, selfhood, and morality, and absolutely riveted to the more action-heavy scenes. This is fun and dark and inventive, and it went in directions I absolutely wasn't expecting--I'll be thinking about the structure of this book for a long time.

It also reads like a love letter to teaching, one that sees the profession with all its flaws but also with deep affection. One of my favorite things about this book was how obviously Tesh *gets* it and encapsulates that on the page--although it also gave me secondhand stress (truly, Walden never gets a break).

This is probably going to be one of my top ten reads of 2025, and I'd be shocked if it doesn't get all sorts of award nominations.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc! Opinions are my own.

I had high expectations for this book. I was lucky enough to get an ARC of *Some Desperate Glory*, which I thought was astonishingly good (the Hugo for Best Novel was very, very well deserved). And during an AMA Emily Tesh mentioned her next project - a book set in a magic school, but from the perspective of the teachers responsible for keeping all these overpowered, overconfident, hormonal teenage idiots from blowing themselves and a good chunk of the local geography to smithereens - I was very excited. When I heard she planned to use years of break-room stories from her own time as a teacher I was *thrilled*.

Happy to report this is easily one of the best magic school books I’ve ever read. Might even be better than Naomi Novik’s *Scholomance* trilogy (I’ll need to chew on things for a while, maybe give it a reread). I can’t think of anything else that comes close.

Saffy Walden, MThau, PhD, is the lead teacher of Invocation (demon summoning) at Chetwood School, a centuries-old boarding school in England, and one of the finest places to study magic before going off to uni. It’s a rewarding job, but a demanding one. There’s all the normal teaching responsibilities - lessons, grading, helping students. There’s the more uniquely *boarding* school responsibilities, being much more involved in her students’ lives and personal, moral, and social development than in a normal school. And then there’s the uniquely *magical* responsibilities, ranging from labor negotiations with the imp in the copy machine, to maintaining the ancient-but-impractical-to-replace magical engines that protect the school, to the occasional exorcism of a student (or maybe just their iPhone) that’s been possessed. And there are some definite bureaucratic turf wars with Laura Kenning, the chief of the school’s contingent of Marshalls, the ancient order dedicated to protecting the world from demons. Obviously, they look a little suspiciously at any invoker, and Dr. Walden is one of the world’s most powerful.

In many ways I’d call this a slice-of-life story. Much of the book is taken up with Walden doing her job, the tasks that are (for her) completely mundane. She is very protective of her star pupil, Nikki, who lost her parents to a demon when young and is a ward of the school, in part because Kenning and the Marshalls are very suspicious of the circumstances of the demon’s arrival. She has other students in her A-level Invocations class (aside from an American - I think this is, like, advanced college prep? Maybe AP?), each with their own challenges. One is a cocky kid from an old-magic family - talented, but overconfident and careless. One is another ward of the school, supremely talented, but utterly *lacking* in confidence. One is a bookworm - not really a naturally talented magician, but extremely disciplined and dedicated. Most of Walden’s energy is going towards shepherding her students towards their exams (and then, hopefully Oxford in Nikki’s case). There’s a very soothing quality to it all that makes me think of Becky Chambers.

But the stakes are much bigger, so it’s not a slice-of-life *book*. There’s an ancient and powerful demon that’s been lurking around the demonic plane adjacent to Chetwood for centuries, feeding off stray magic and the (very occasional) student or teacher when the wards fail. Let’s just say telling us about that demon without having it be a plot point would be a massive Chekov’s gun, and Tesh is too good a writer for that.

There are a number of magic-school tropes that this completely does away with, and it’s delightful. It’s set in more-or-less our world, but magic is open and known - Walden, for example, impresses the hell out of her students when she lets slip that the Pentagon approached her after grad school and offered her a job, which she turned down. Technology works just fine - matter of fact, the school is rather draconian about its smartphone rules because demons have a habit of possessing them. And Chetwood not only offers an excellent *magical* education, it offers an excellent education all-around; knowing magic is great and all, but you also have to understand, you know, math and such. The current Headmaster is actually a geography teacher, which is part of why so much of the magical side of the admin falls on Walden.

And, naturally, there’s romance. Walden might clash with Chief Marshall Kenning, but she’s also aware that Kenning is competent, dedicated, and extremely attractive.

Cannot recommend this one highly enough. She’s done it again. Comes out on May 13.

Incredible from start to finish, this academic fantasy from the POV of a teacher is so beautifully written, with heart-wrenching moments, relatably disastrous attempts at flirting, and a climax that I can't stop thinking about, is my current favorite book of the year.

I adored this book. Everything from the imp in the copy machine to the love story to the twist of who is really the villain was magnificently crafted. I will be recommending this to so many friends who love academic magic and academics who just want to help their students succeed.

A magical school story told from the perspective of a teacher instead of a student? Absolutely. This book balances the wonder of academia with the exhaustion of bureaucracy, following Dr. Walden as she juggles lesson plans, staff meetings, and the small matter of keeping demons from breaking through the school’s wards.

The worldbuilding is seamless, making magic feel as intricate and demanding as any academic discipline. Walden herself is a fantastic protagonist—brilliant, deeply flawed, and increasingly haunted by forces both external and internal. Tesh’s writing is sharp and atmospheric, blending humor with an underlying tension that keeps the story moving.

While some of the relationships felt underdeveloped, the novel thrives on its originality and execution. A must-read for fans of dark academia who want something fresh, intelligent, and just a little terrifying.

This was a fascinating book, quite niche. I don't think I've seen a magical boarding school novel from the teacher's perspective before. An interesting combination of the magical and the mundane. I thought the worldbuilding was incredible and made the world entirely believable.

I loved Emily Tesh's SOME DESPERATE GLORY, and while I'm not a huge fan of dark academia, I was intrigued immediately by the premise of THE INCANDESCENT. I needn't have worried. Tesh offers a fresh perspective on dark academia from the POV of a teacher at a magic school who is an expert at demonology, and the plot gets better with every page.

An atmospheric and riveting sapphic dark academia novel, set at an English boarding school for magicians.

Dr. Saffy Walden has dedicated her life to two things: the pursuit of magical excellence, and her position as Director of Magic at Chetwood Academy. Her days are filled with marking, meetings, and the endless minutia of administration. One of the most important parts of her job is keeping the demons, some of whom are centuries old and unimaginably powerful, away from the centuries-old school and her young charges.

It was rather refreshing to read a story about a magical school from the perspective of one of the adults that keeps it running. This point of view allowed the story to feel simultaneously nostalgic and fresh. As someone who works in education, I really enjoyed the bureaucracy of it all. Dr. Walden is a flawed yet loveable protaganist, and Tesh does an excellent job at slowly unravelling her backstory for the reader.

Tesh has a way with words, and the prose was achingly beautiful at times, quirky and silly at others. Some moments were heartbreaking and poignant, others quirky and goofy, which created a nice balance.

I would have liked to see the romance storyline developed a tad more, as it felt sometimes out of place, or like a bit of an afterthought. I enjoyed its inclusion and was happy with its conclusion, but I would have liked to see more along the way.

Overall, this is a lovely read and I recommend it- fun, wildly readable, and a unique perspective on a much-loved genre.

The Incadenscent by Emily Tesh was such a fantastic and enjoyable read. It does an amazing job of showing the exploration of magic and identity set against the haunting backdrop of a magical academy. The writing is sharp as it is evocative, drawing readers into a world where personal demons are as dangerous as the magical threats lurking in the shadows. The characters are complex and relatable with deep emotional layers that make their struggles and victories all the more impactful.

The book effortlessly balances the intrigue of dark academia with the weight of self-discovery, making it both thrilling and introspective. The world building is rich and immersive providing just enough detail to feel fully realized without slowing down the plot. This is a perfect read for anyone who enjoys magic, hidden secrets and complex characters. It kept me hooked right from the beginning.

a dark academia book from the perspective of the teacher instead of the students? count me in. we get to see the mundanity of a teacher's day to day life where her job is to teach, keep the school running, and prevent any demons from infiltrating the school wards. it was very well paced, with constant conflict happening throughout the entirety of the book. the relationships were underdeveloped and flat, but i don't think they were that important to the story that i minded the lack of development. Tesh's writing is always beautiful and evocative and is seen once again on these pages. it is a beautiful story, with complete world-building, magic where you actually have to learn how to use it and use it properly, and a journey of finding oneself no matter how old or young you are.

I loved this book and I would definitely recommend it! I really enjoyed how this book follows the professor teaching overpowered students instead of the typical story the other way around. Dr. Saffy Walden was also a wonderfully human character to follow, and her POV was genuinely enjoyable. A lot of the book seemed to have a similar vibe as “Emily Wilde”, but I personally find Saffy less annoying, and her flaws come up more often which I appreciated. I also found it interesting the nuance between describing her as “Walden” or “Saffy” depending on the situation and her own feelings.

I found the pacing of this novel a little weird to begin, we get a huge “boss fight” about a quarter of the way in, as well as being introduced very quickly to a not-quite-enemy turned lover. After that was over and I still had most of the book left I was like “now what?” But I ended up really appreciating this deviance from the “norm” of storytelling and I think it made the ending more powerful. The middle of the book is a little slower, and we get to see more of the inner workings of a school, but we are also given a mystery to ponder over with Saffy, along with a FWB situation with someone who is not the aforementioned lover >:(

And then the end was wild! Wild enough to text some friends “AAAAAAAA”!!! multiple times. I was bamboozled. The ending itself probably bumped my rating up from 4.5 to a solid 5 stars. Definitely will be staff picking this at work when it releases!! Thank you NetGalley and TorBooks for the arc :)

While the premise was nice, the writing was... not what I expected. I wanted more from the characters because I felt that what was on the front cover and the front flap was not what we were given.

Dr. Saffy Walden, Director of Magic at Chetwood Academy, has a lot of her plate. Including demons, four bright and precocious A-level students, and her own carefully-kept secret that might just blow up if she's not careful.

With a magic system somewhat reminiscent of Novik's Scholomance series (if a little less convoluted), The Incandescent is a boarding school fantasy from an unusual point of view--a very tired and overworked teacher who is just trying to keep her students safe and turn her marking in on time. Walden is a wonderful protagonist, complex and whip-smart, even as she makes grave errors the reader can see from a mile away, but she has a stack of essays to mark and a magical shield-strengthening engine to keep in shape and no time to analyze anyone's strange behavior. The empathy Walden has for her students and the intriguing romantic subplot between her and the tough demon hunter Laura are the brightest points in a novel that shines throughout. This book is a compelling addition to Tesh's impressive catalog.

I highly enjoyed this story! Set at a boarding school outside of alternative-London constantly at risk of demon incursion, the Director of Magic must balance the typical overwhelming workload of a teacher and school administrator with added magical responsibilities like imps possessing the staff copy machine and demanding snacks. There was plenty of excellent adventure, a will-they-or-won't-they romance, and an excellently laid out magical system and demonic realm. I love the magical school trope and it was fun reading one told completely from the professor's point of view, rather than the students.

I've read a lot of books that are about how to learn magic, and I think that this is the first book I've read about how to teach magic. I loved it. It gave me the fun of the setting of a magic school, but with a point of view that was sufficiently novel to make it feel not even a little bit derivative. It turns out that the plot archetypes of learning magic don't apply at all, and so I didn't have a deep sense of where the story was going to go.

I think one of the key things that a magic school novel has to do is to make the experience and challenges of being a young student of magic feel believable; it gets really boring when the answer is the students just have to try harder or believe in their selves more. To that end, I loved the way that The Magicians made it clear that learning magic involved a lot of hard study, and The Incandescent does that as well. I think of books like The Will of the Many where the student characters sometimes feel like caricatures of pure determination, which I don't really identify with and which don't line up with what I think my seventeen-year-old self was like, even from the inside; the key thing with this book is that the narrator is a teacher, and so when she views the students, she sees them from an adult's point of view, which does line up with my current view of myself at seventeen. I was once that age and facing similar academic expectations and studying really hard, and The Incandescent feels really believable.

That believability is maybe the greatest praise I can give this book. The worldbuilding feels self-consistent and doesn't require me to imagine that societies of people in similar conditions to the real world would behave fundamentally differently to the way that real societies do. Emily Tesh's world is a one where magic exists but it is difficult to do, and so most people don't bother, where it's just another specialist subject that faces questions of what career opportunities exist once you graduate. I imagine that if you showed someone from a hundred years ago what a computer can do, they would feel like that was magic and be surprised that every single person wasn't a programmer to be able to wield that magic, but we aren't all doing that, and so neither is everybody in this book learning magic.

It turns out that Tesh is herself a teacher in Hertfordshire and did go to Cambridge; this surprises me not at all (who else would have a character sing "Oh, I'd rather be at Oxford than St. Johns"?). The degree of specificity in the writing about what it is to be a teacher (and why one would want to be a teacher) is so perfect that I would have been shocked to learn that she had no experience with it. The nitty gritty details of the day to day give the whole book an incredible grounding. Tesh has clearly had both a lot of experience with and given a lot of thought to the ways that people interact with privilege in education, and that thoughtfulness and intent shines through. If there is any justice in this world, this book will be incredibly popular; it has certainly set a standard against which I will compare future books.

3.8

This one was like if Emily Wilde, Evocation, and An Academy For Liars had a love child. I really appreciated our analytical middle aged workaholic professor protagonist. I thought it was really refreshing that the novice teenagers weren't the heroes or focus of the story. I liked the world building and hard magic system the author developed. I love how in depth and academic this book gets. I think some people will be frustrated by the relationships in this story, but I think it's well balanced and realistic that Saffy would be socially/romantically awkward and maybe miss some cues.

I think that where this book could use a little bit of work is adding in some emotional counterbalance to the dry analytical pov. And it was a little frustrating for someone so careful and competent to miss some of the glaring things that were happening.

Overall, I enjoyed it a lot and I am happy to recommend it to customers and followers who are fans of dark academia. (Specifically those who were a little disappointed in Evocation for not focusing enough on the demonic aspects of the story.)

Ugh, Emily Tesh. One of our greatest living authors. Her capacity to shift between genres with such ease while creating characters with such complexity adds to the thrill of reading her books. This take on dark academia was delightful, insightful, and, at times, perfectly dull in an almost refreshing way. The writing really takes off when a new narrator takes hold and very much wish we could’ve spent a little more time in that arc.

This is very much as described: Scholomance series by Naomi Novik but with teachers and from their perspective. Beware going in, there is very British terminology being used in this book — though entirely comprehensible. It was wonderful to step into this magical, old British private (public in the UK) school setting from the point of view of a middle aged woman. She is not only extremely good at what she does but is one of the few at the top of her field and bisexual, but also quite the role model for the young adults who will be effecting change in their generations. So wholesome while also dark and twisty. This book is definitely the breath of fresh air I needed. Highly recommend.

If I had a nickle for everytime one of my gay ships cut one an arm off their partner I'd have two nickels. Which is weird that it happened twice-
I LOVEEEE dark academia, especially sapphic, but another relationship in this had me WORRIED for a second. I really also liked learning about each of the students

I loved the idea of a magic school story that focuses on a teacher instead of a student, and this did not disappoint. I definitely related to Doctor Walden as a character who likes to study, educate, and excel at everything (except, perhaps, social interactions, haha). The magic system, where you have to actually work to get good and even a simple mistake can result in demonic possession, was fabulous. Really enjoyable.