The Incandescent

Emily Tesh

This is a book that hangs on the notion that teachers are the real heroes in a school. And if the school was magical, well, that’s at least doubly true. There are a lot of stories out there about the students; this one is about the teachers.

Welcome to Chetwood School, a British boarding school where our heroine, Dr. Saffy Walden, is the Director of Magic. She is also one of the most powerful magicians in England. But when we meet her in chapter one, she’s filling out a risk assessment form. She designed this particular piece of paperwork, and she hates it. Everybody hates it. But tomorrow, she’ll be teaching a class of bright seventeen-year-olds how to summon a medium-sized demon for the first time. If there was ever a reason not to skip the risk assessment form, this is it. She works through the bullet points, imagining the disasters — Fire. Injury: Mundane. Injury: Enchanted. Summoning array misfire. Magician error: Overconfidence. Magician error: Under-confidence. She writes out cantrips (minor magic spells) and considers the outcomes. And it’s about right there that you will think, Yes, Emily Tesh. Tell me more about how a magic school works.

The Incandescent is a fresh take on a world that might feel familiar: a cozy magic school with the reality knob turned up a bit, English accents, six hundred students, wood-panelled corridors, imps in the appliances. But then Tesh flips the script by putting the focus on the teachers. Specifically, on Dr. Walden. In her late thirties, single, senior management, very competent, and an alumna of the school, she’s about to have the worst academic year of her life.

That summoning mentioned above? It goes wrong, and wrong in a specific way that no risk assessment could cover. What Walden’s gifted students accidentally summon is not, as expected, a medium-sized minor demon. It’s a higher demon, one of the ‘big boys,’ in the words of Dr. Walden’s old thesis advisor. And this demon doesn’t just try to eat them, it talks to them, and it seems to know Walden personally. Things get significantly worse from there. The first 150 pages or so play out, pleasingly, as you might expect. The remainder veers into surprising places, and the final act lands like a body blow, in a good way.

Dr. Walden is a workaholic. Her career is her life, and she wears a professional armor that’s been constructed over decades. Tesh renders that with tenderness and compassion — and she approaches the work of teaching with precision and insight. How to correct without shaming. When to give a student praise or send them to the nurse. Conversations about who’s the best person to deliver advice — and when. Why silence often works better than a demerit. What it’s like to work with a student that you know will someday surpass you. How you carry the load for hundreds of young people with ordinary crises – bullying, eating disorders, family collapse – along with, and sometimes bleeding into, the extraordinary ones.

There’s also a queer romance in this book that, refreshingly, takes its time and feels remarkably adult. Like two people who have been around a bit, negotiating something good.

If you are or have been a teacher — or have ever loved a teacher — this book will find you.

So modern technology was one risk. But actually, if anyone had ever looked at something and called it ‘you’—assigning it a self, whether it deserved one or not — then a space had been made, and in that space something could live. Provided, of course, that there was enough magic around for the demon to make the crossing from its own plane to this one.

Since Chetwood was lousy with six and a half centuries’ worth of adolescent wild magic, and the staffroom photocopier was called variations on ‘you bloody bastard thing’ by dozens of people every day, there was no point trying to keep it clear. You just ended up re-exorcising it once a week. Even the Marshals had given up. Its current inhabitant was a known quantity, and there was a large bowl of salt next to the fire extinguisher in the staffroom, in case of emergencies. — Emily Tesh

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