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.

Interesting plotline full of twists and suspense. The book does feel like it is trying to incorporate too much, but still was an enjoyable read. I would not compare it to Harry Potter however. The readers will be disappointed by that. The character development could use some work. Many of characters I found to be a bit flat. If many characters are involved. Overall, the book had its negatives, but the positives won out.

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.

A Book Review - 
School for Psychics' by K.C. Archer

5/5 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Synopsis: 

An entrancing new story, starring a funny, impulsive, and sometimes congratulatory young woman, who discovers she has psychic abilities. Then, she must decide whether to use them for good or not. 

Teddy cannon is not your typical twenty something year old woman. She is scrappy, resourceful, bright, and she has an uncanny ability to read people - little does she know she has psychic abilities. When a series of bad decisions leads her to police, a stranger intervenes, and invites Teddy to the School for Psychics. The facility is hidden off the coast of San Francisco, where students train like delta force operatives. However, just as Teddy feels as though she has found a place where she can fit in, things start to happen, strange things like robberies, missing students and more. Leading Teddy to accept a dangerous mission that will cause her to question everything, her friends, her teachers, her family, and even herself. 

Review: 

I was given this title through NetGalley, on behalf of Publishing company, in exchange for my honest review. 

Wow!! Completely in love with Teddy, and how she grows throughout the story from the beginning to the end. She is a witty brass-balls character, and an adventure from beginning to end with her. I love the world building around the school as well, very unique and creative. The author definitely has some amazing talent. I think fans will totally fall in love the Harry Potter type feel at the school as Teddy learns there are way more types of Psychic ability than she had ever thought. You will for sure become engrossed in the story and characters alike!! Happy reading bookworms!!

I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Meet Teddy, a young girl from Las Vegas who has a knack for reading people at the poker tables. We learn that she is down on her luck, living out of her parent’s garage, having recently been kick out of Stanford. Her adopted parents hope that she will get her life together, but that’s not very likely since we meet her, sneaking into a casino having stolen all of her parent’s savings and hoping to make it big at the poker tables. She is in disguise because she has been banned from every casino for what they believe is cheating although they can’t prove it. She just has a knack for knowing when people are lying. It is something she has always had sixth sense. It hasn’t encouraged her to have a lot of trust for her fellow man keeping her at arm’s length from every relationship. Teddy needs to win big because she owes money to a Russian mobster.

Well, she gets taken for all of her cash at the poker table and just before she gets found out by the mob help comes in the form of a huge linebacker of a man named Clint. Through mind control he whisks her out of the casino and offers her a way out. It turns out that he believes Teddy has psychic ability and that is why she can read people so well at the card table. He invites her to attend a special school that develops psychic ability in order to help different law enforcement agencies. To turn her life around, get out of the trouble she is in and be able to develop her abilities to do good in the world is what make Teddy agree to enrol. The story continues as she completes her first year, but not without a mystery to solve including the secret of her past, and learning lots about herself and allowing friends to make the difference in her new world.

I loved this book! I couldn’t wait to keep reading each chapter to see what was going to happen next. I found the characters were well developed, three dimensional and you were invested in what was going to happen to them. The whole psychic angle was so much fun, especially as you got to learn of all the different kinds of psychic abilities. I’m just saying - I wouldn’t mind some heat - am I right ladies! Don’t worry - all PG. The mystery was exciting and since Teddy is adopted, secrets from her past including who her parents are become of interest. Since psychics can’t “read” other psychics, Teddy never knows fully who she can trust and who is on her side.

This is billed as book 1 so I hoping this is one of a multiple book series. Teddy has completed one year of her program so I’m guessing there could be a book each year of her school. I can’t wait until the next book will be released.

Although not the sort of book I usually read, I thoroughly enjoyed School for Psychics. The story is well written and captivating. The range of dramatic settings are conducive to the psychic shenanigans that the interesting and often eccentric characters get up to. A must read for fans of Harry Potter. Thanks to Simon and Schuster and NetGalley for the ARC.

*I received an ecopy of this book via NetGalley. This has not influenced my review.*

Though I struggled to get invested at first, this was one of those books that got better as it went on. For my review though, I've decided to make some good ol' lists!

Likes:

- In the beginning, Teddy was unlikeable, but she was realistic. She was someone who had made a lot of bad decisions, ones that led to having a gambling problem, and owing a lot of money to a bad man, and stealing money from her parents to pay off some of her debt. Even when she got to the school, which was her last chance to turn her life around, she kept making bad decisions, like showing up to her entrance exam late because she was hungover and had spent the night with a guy. But then she started trying to change, and in some ways she did, in other ways she didn't, in other ways still she took a while but eventually started to get there. And I think the same can be said for all the characters---none of them were too perfect, and all of them were frustrating to read about at times. It was completely believable though. People aren't perfect, people make bad choices, people don't communicate everything, people don't change overnight, and some people don't change at all in some ways. So the characters were not easily likeable, but I appreciated how realistic they were.

- The book had some relationships that didn't go as expected or that didn't last long, but that was believable too. Some acquaintances never become more. Some friendships are temporary. Not every person you're attracted to becomes someone you date. And this bit of realism kept the friendships and relationships unpredictable.

- The book had its funny moments, and Teddy could be relatable, at times, as a fellow millennial.

- The plot started a bit slow-paced but got more gripping as the book went on.

Dislikes:

- Teddy made some decisions that didn't make sense to me. Like lying to Clint when there were strange and possibly dangerous things happening, and like automatically trusting certain people even though she had major trust issues in general.

- At the beginning, the book seemed to be full of cliches and stereotype characters---the brooding bad boy with black hair over his eyes and tattoos, the hacker friend, the "alphas" and "misfits" cliques, the tough female drill sergeant instructor (whom I'm immediately pictured as Jane Lynch for some reason). While I can't say these really changed, they did become less noticeable as the story filled out, and some of the characters were shown to be more than just their stereotype.

- Sometimes characters (who, supposedly, could not read minds) seemed to know/understand things that they shouldn't have. This wasn't a big deal, it didn't cause any plot holes or anything, it just bothered me each time it happened.

- At the start of the book, Teddy mentioned having epilepsy, but it was quickly revealed to just be a side effect of her psychic ability. There was really no point in even including that. It just kind of makes the disability seem like it's not a real thing.

- Sometimes things happened a little too perfectly.

Overall Thoughts:

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this book, but it wasn't bad. There were a few things that didn't quite make sense, but the realism of the imperfect characters definitely stood out to me in a great way.

Psychic abilities are the magic system defining this written for grown-ups, YA syle, urban fantasy.
Somewhat formulaetic, but a thoroughly enjoyable, quick read.

The School for Psychics by K.C. Archer

Teddy is a young woman adrift. She has some unique abilities, but she tends to use them only for personal gain, and it doesn’t take long for that to backfire. She’s run out of options when she meets Clint Corbett and he not only gets her out of her terrifying situation, he invites her to apply to a top-secret government program called “The School for Psychics.”

As Teddy learns about the school, along with classmates with their own gifts, she also learns more about who…and what…she is. To say it confuses her is an understatement. Old wounds are re-opened, and her innate lack of trust emerges to cause her even more trouble, and to save her from some.

Part Avengers, part Harry Potter, Part Allegiance, this governmental – or spy, who knows? -- conspiracy sets itself apart in a few ways. First, the characters are all college age or more…some are returning to school after years in jobs where they never quite fit. Everyone must be invited. They are twenty something plus, there is a blend of private school rules added to a young adult need for fun… including parties, substances and sex. This is not a book for kids.

There are a lot of characters to get to know, but by the end of the book we feel bonded with them. Something is going on at Whitfield College. These psychics may figure it out.

I confess that I didn’t notice the “Book One” connotation at the beginning of this novel, which explains why I kept hoping for resolution of all the open questions. I didn’t get them in Book One. For sure I will be reading future releases. I can’t leave these young people alone! It was an easy fun read…and I’m hoping the series doesn’t go on too long.

I was invited to read this book by the publisher, Simon and Shuster, Inc. with no strings attached.

This was a quite impressive mystery/coming-of-age novel. I was never quite sure of who to trust, and that ending...! I will be biding my time until the sequel comes out.

I think this book is well written, but the subject matter was not of interest to me.

Rating: 3.25/5

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for making this title available as a digital advanced reading copy.

School for Psychics is your typical story featuring a girl who has lived her life as a misfit, was adopted when she was young because her parents "died in a car crash," doesn't realize she has superpowers, gets to school to discover she has SUPER superpowers (hmmm...about those parents?), bands with a group of other misfits to solve a giant mystery...you know the type. That being said, as far as those stories go, this one was pretty good. So if those are your usual jam, you'll probably enjoy School for Psychics.

In the story, Teddy has lived her whole life believing she was epileptic, doomed to be a screw-up forever, and cursed with an uncomfortable (even disruptive) ability to tell when someone was lying. She's channeled that ability into poker and gotten herself into some serious trouble. A man shows up, demonstrates his psychic abilities, and tells her that she's psychic, too. He convinces her to come to school, the Whitfield Institute, and give herself a second chance.

The rest of the book is devoted to Teddy's first year at Whitfield. She struggles in her classes, with her new friends (which she has never really had before), and with her super-rare, super-impressive, super-hard-to-control powers in astral telepathy. She's also headstrong, impulsive, and extremely curious, especially when it comes to her parents—which leads her down a path that quickly careens out of control.

The premise of the book is intriguing, even if the execution was occasionally a little bit off. There were a lot of major plot points that were almost frustratingly clear to the reader, but Liz didn't see any of them until the end. I think this is because the author wrote certain scenes just to drop hints rather than working the hints into aspects of the broader plot. In real life, the pivotal moments would have been easy to miss, but when a whole chapter occurs just so that moment can happen, the reader catches on pretty quickly.

The end moved pretty quickly, though. I do want to know what will happen next and how it will all resolve. If all of the books in this series were already published, I'd probably pick up the next one right away.

In the beginning of this book I wasn’t sure I was going to stick with it. A young adult named Teddy spends a lot of time in a casino (disguised, since she is banned) trying to win back money she needs to pay off a loan shark. This beginning is needed to set the background of her being desperate for money and having an idea that she is able to somehow tell if someone is lying. It doesn’t make too much since though since she has obviously lost a lot of money. Because of those reasons though, when she is approached/saved by a man recruiting her into a secret psychic school she chooses to go. That section of the book was very slow, But I’m glad I stuck it out.
When she gets to the school the story finally starts to get interesting. She learns a lot about her self and her past. She makes new friends (although you don’t understand why she had a hard time with that before). There is something mysterious going on at the school and I liked how there are just enough hints to give you clues without giving it away. It’s a perfect amount of suspense.
I’d recommend this book to people who like crime-solving types of books along with people who like books about psychic abilities, girls who have a hard time fitting in, suspense and mystery.
***There is non-descriptive sex, sexual remarks, and bad language (all I found unnecessary) and very mild violence.
I received an e-ARC from the publisher through Net Gallery for my honest review.

This book is the first installment of a new series by author KC Archer (ARC was provided by the publisher in exchange of a fair review). The story focuses around a young woman, Teddy Cannon who has an out of the ordinary ability to read people but yet has landed herself in a bit of trouble with a Las Vegas loan shark. She is saved from further trouble by a mysterious stranger who invites her to attend the School for Psychics, an elite government facility where she will be able to work on her psychic powers. There Teddy makes new friends and new enemies and discover some information about her past.
In the beginning, I found it hard to get on with the premises that someone with Teddy’s talents would end up owning so much money to a loan shark. But once Teddy joined the School for Psychics and that the story unfolded, I enjoyed it quite a bit. The different characters are interesting. Overall the plot is not the most original and the story is a bit slow to start but entertaining nonetheless. I am pretty sure that I will pick up the next book in the series. I also hear that The CW bought the rights and is developing a show based on this. I will be looking forward to the cast for this.

It started off a little slow for me but picked up at the right time. I got a cross of X-men with a dash of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D vibe.This is the first if it's kind for me and I'm eager to read more of Teddy' s story. Thank you for the chance to read this.