I love retelling of a magic school from a teachers perspective. As a teacher myself I get the frustration and bureaucracy that goes into managing students. I would recommend this to anyone.

I really enjoyed this. It was a fun fresh take on dark academia. The characters were unique and I thought the prose was beautiful written.

The Incandescent is one of those books that really just clicked for me and I was hooked from the first page. I really appreciated fine and intricate detail in stories, which is exactly what we get from page one via our protagonist's role as Director of Magic at Chetwood School. This world is fascinating and I loved the school setting from Doctor Walden's perspective rather than the students. I loved learning about her role in keeping the school safe from demons (yes, you read the correctly--demons; it is a magical school, after all), and I was fascinated to see what directions this story would take. The writing was wonderful, which is no surprise coming from Emily Tesh, and I was so enamored with the academia setting, as it is one I'm both familiar with and love exploring. Really loved this one and would absolutely recommend it!

This was quite possibly the best book I've read so far in 2025. The writing was so evocative, the story so engrossing! I was RAPT from page one. As a survivor of higher academia, I laughed out loud a hundred times throughout the book. If this was a series, I would read nine parts. Let! Them! Kiss! More! God, I loved this book.

This book was genius from start to finish!!! I love Emily Tesh’s brain and I want to stay inside the worlds they create long after the last page.

Emily Tesh's new book provides readers with a new twist on academia-related fantasy, the teacher's perspective. Dr. Walden is an administrator/teacher at Chetwood School of Magic, and her magic is powerful. She keeps the school running while dealing demon incursions, large and small, and teaching magical teens (and drama ensues). This change of pace is engaging, and at times, delightful. Demons demanding "blood" and then "paper" to clear up a paper jam strangely makes sense. This book will appeal to readers who appreciate a slower-paced narrative, strong characterization, and a unique setting.

Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Publishing for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I read this author's previous book and really enjoyed it, so I was pleased that I also enjoyed this one! I am a little cautious about dark academia, but I loved how Walden was a teacher and not a student. I thought that was a very clever way to add a twist to the genre! This was very cleverly written.

I loved this book. A dark academia book from the perspective of an elder millennial teacher/administrator trying to protect her students from demons and ghosts. I thought that this was witty and well written. I love the concept of telling this story about a magical school in the current age where demons are attracted to technology; mainly cell phones. I'm not sure that I enjoyed how the romance was tackeled, but all in all, a great read that I will be recommending.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Books for the advance readers copy in exchange for my honest review. All thoughts are my own.

Thank you the NetGalley and the publisher for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: I have sat on this for a moment. I tried to read this book several times and I enjoyed the start of it. However, it quickly fell off and I just wasn't enjoying the story. That's not to say that had I been in a different mood, or at a different time may have enjoyed it. Though I did try to wait it out and see. I think the main problem I had was that I was just bored. If you are more of a cozy fantasy reader then you will love this. Cozy fantasy just isn't usually my jam I've learned. So I'm writing this review now, so that the cozy fantasy readers will see it and pick it up!

When I saw that Emily Tesh's followup to Some Desperate Glory was a fantasy centering on a school for magic in Britain, I wondered if she could do the same turn-it-on-its-head work for magical schools that she accomplished for military science fiction in Some Desperate Glory. I must admit I was a little skeptical. And for the first chapters of the book, The Incandescence was merely a compelling fantasy centering on the work of Dr. Walden, Director of Magic. The detail of a school administrator in a school for magic is quite realistically drawn, down to the relief that Walden feels when she gets to teach her one class (of older, more advanced, students).
The systems of magic that Tesh constructs are the most vividly drawn since the fantasy classic Master of the Five Magics by Lyndon Hardy (1980), though here with a stronger plot and deeper characterizations.

And then something happens that turns the narrative on its head. The last third is harrowing. Walden's sacrifice is so courageous it brought tears to my eyes.

Oh yeah, and there's a bit of a sapphic romance, too.

I really loved this book!! As an educator it was really fun to read a dark academia type title from the perspective of a teacher instead of a group of like, chosen one teens. I'd be surprised if Tesh has never been a teacher because it felt very authentic. The characters in this book were all fleshed out and dynamic, and the plot was a bit predictable in a couple places but I didn't mind because it was still so enjoyable. Loved the sapphic romantic subplot as well. Thank you so much to NetGalley for the ARC!

I've never read anything by Emily Tesh, but the synopsis caught my eye and I'm so glad! I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Dr. Walden was an interesting character and I loved the world building. I'm new to the dark academia genre, but now I definitely want to read more.

I’ve picked up Emily Tesh twice before in my attempts to cover as much Hugo-nominated fiction as possible since becoming a voter in 2021. In both cases, I had some fairly substantial critiques, but I enjoyed the prose and characterization enough to come away with overall positive impressions. And so I jumped at the chance to pick up an advance copy of her newest magical school novel, The Incandescent. 
The Incandescent takes place at an elite English boarding school and is written from the perspective of a powerful demon summoner who has returned to her old school to serve as Director of Magic. But with teenage students with the power to summon demons, enough ambient magical energy to attract some of the most powerful, and a combination of age and budgetary restrictions making for particularly kludgy defenses, there’s bound to be a whole lot of danger accompanying the inevitable drudgery of paperwork. 

Readers of the same age as the protagonist have grown up on magical boarding school novels, and while The Incandescent shifts the perspective to the teacher’s side, it’s not hard to see the famous influences. The best summoner in the school is an orphan whose family had died at the hands of a powerful demon, for starters. And the attraction of powerful demons to vulnerable teen magicians clearly hearkens to Naomi Novik’s hit Scholomance series. It’s a book that seems thoroughly targeted at bookish millennials who grew up on magic schools and now find themselves decades out of school working jobs with quite a bit more drudgery than they might have expected as high-achieving teenagers. And, well, that’s a pretty big niche, and it’s no surprise to see so many early reviews from readers—especially English readers—who feel The Incandescent is speaking personally to them. 

And because Emily Tesh is a good writer, The Incandescent is a good read, whether or not you’re part of the target audience. I’m not sure the lead character is quite as interesting as the cult-raised heroine of Some Desperate Glory, but she’s absolutely well-drawn, and the school’s dangers make for some heart-pounding scenes. I could easily see this becoming a comfort read for plenty of fantasy fans, with its familiar setting, easy readability, and enough tension to squeeze out real-life distractions. For readers looking for something familiar and well-constructed, there’s not a lot to complain about. 

But the other side of the comfort read coin is that there’s also not enough to truly catch the reader off guard. The rivals-to-lovers romantic subplot is clear from the second chapter. The demon that’s overdue for an attack on the school will indeed attack. The characters that the reader is told to trust will be trustworthy, and those the reader is told to mistrust will not. I appreciate foreshadowing as much as the next fantasy fan, but everything here is so thoroughly foreshadowed that there’s little room left to be stunned by a clever twist or a particularly eye-catching scene. So for me, it’s a good read that lacks that oomph to ascend to greatness. 

I’ve seen many reviewers talk about the discussion of class in The Incandescent, and that’s absolutely a theme worth mentioning here. The lead has her eyes wide open about the elitism and inaccessibility of her school, even in the midst of her pride at their mission to teach orphaned sorcerers. And the varied backgrounds of the students and teachers cuts across lines of ability and sets their paths far more surely than their talent. But while this theme is handled much more overtly and honestly than in other novels with similar settings, it always feels like something lurking in the background of a fun magic school novel instead of like a selling point in and of itself. By pure happenstance, I read The Incandescent the same week that I read The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, and former’s exploration of class divides in academia pales in comparison to the latter’s truly devastating development of the theme. Not hitting the level of Samatar isn’t exactly a criticism, but at the same time, this element of The Incandescent doesn’t hit wow levels. 

Overall, The Incandescent is a well-written and engaging magic school novel from the perspective of a teacher. It doesn’t gloss over some of the issues with previous uses of similar settings, and it’s a good read from start to finish that is almost guaranteed to hit the right notes for a wide swathe of genre readership. It may not be a stunner that’s going to stick in my head all year, but I have no doubt that such a well-executed spin on popular genre tropes will be a beloved favorite for a whole lot of readers. 

Recommended if you like: magic school novels.

Overall rating: 16 of Tar Vol's 20. Four stars on Goodreads.

I mean, you had me at Emily Tesh does dark academia. That's really all I needed to know. The comparisons to Naomi Novik's Scholamance series are completely fair, and I loved that this is magical boarding school from a teacher's perspective. Really great!

This book is not like Harry Potter. At all. But: What if you take a Deputy Head of an English boarding school for magically capable children, in the era of internet and smartphones, and tell a story from their point of view? You end up with something vaguely reminiscent of what Professor McGonagall probably was thinking about the activities of the Hogwarts kids, except there are demons, and she's bisexual. It's awesome.



So. The Incandescent follows Dr. Saphire Walden, a PhD in (demon) invocation and a teacher at an elite school with a strong magic curriculum in addition to the more mundane chemistry, rowing and rugby. Dr. Walden (who goes by "Saffy") is teaching a group of 17-18 year-olds in an advanced magic seminar. The story is both about Saffy and the four students whom she teaches, the magical messes the students create that Saffy needs to help manage, and the personal growth of Saffy herself.



I was instantly captured by the writing and premise of this book. The idea that demons can inhabit any object (or person) with "self-ness" was amusing and frightening at the same time. (You will never call your cell phone by a pronoun ever again). I loved the acerbic observations about academia, government functioning and the education system. The magic system was well-integrated with modern living in the way that makes my urban-fantasy-loving soul happy. As a primer to the book magic system: Invocation is calling forth demons using very precise forms, evocation is more like physical spell casting, instantiation is basically alchemy and divination was debunked years ago.



The tone had the same delightful wit as the Scholomance series, interspersed with funny anecdotes about teaching. I am not going to say much more because I don't want to spoil anything, but the conversations with a certain being I thought were great. I cringed hard at all of the awkward moments we see in Saffy's personal life and cheered just as hard when something went right. My only wish is that the ending expanded a little bit more on later book events, but overall it is a wonderful standalone and a great addition to the dark academia genre. 4.5 stars, and I would recommend it for fans of the Scholomance Series by Naomi Novik, the Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso and Phoenix Keeper by S. A. MacLean.

I love getting fantasy dark academia from the viewpoint of a teacher closer to my age than to our typical 20-something-year-old “hero.” I was immersed into this world that feels as if the present day had magic and our usual universities taught it. I resonated so much with Dr. Walden and the struggles of balancing teaching and real-life.

At the same time, the magic and fighting back demonic incursions from demons that are attracted to technology was such a fun plotline. I would love to see more from this world, but alas this was a standalone.

I had a blast reading and listening to this. The narration was perfect to get truly immersed into the storytelling and fall in love with the characters, the love story and Dr. Walden’s fight to keep the students from accidentally killing themselves and those around them.

4.5 stars

Thank you to @torbooks for the eARC and @macmillan.audio for the ALC. All thoughts are my own.

I've read pretty much every fantasy dark academia or academia adjacent fantasy book I can get my hands on, and I'm a huge Emily Tesh fan. Needless to say, this book was one of my most anticipated releases of 2025. I loved experiencing the magical school from the adult/professor perspective!

The Incandescent is a very layered book, and I think everything that happened was very intentional. I've had to sit with it and process my thoughts for a bit. There is a mixture of slice-of-life as a teacher, personal drama, and some potentially deadly situations. This style worked for me, but I can see how it wouldn't work for everyone. Emily Tesh is so good at writing flawed characters, and while you won't always agree with them, they will stay on brand and their actions always make sense.

The relationships felt very real and genuine, and even though I wanted to yell at Saffy sometimes, I completely understand why she made the choices that she did. I also liked how issues within the education system were called out.

This book is definitely like The Scholomance for adults (if it had teachers and anyone cared whether the students lived or not), I haven't read the other comp, Plain Bad Heroines, but it's now on my TBR. I recently read and loved The Raven Scholar, and I think there were some similarities there too.

I'm somewhere between 4-4.5 on the star rating.

This was a fascinating book — I picked it up because I loved the author’s last one, and I was interested in how the switch from sci fi to fantasy would go. It is dark academia, which isn’t really my thing, but I did really appreciate the viewpoint of a badass female teacher my age rather than a student. Does that mean less drama? No, but for me, it was more compelling drama because the consequences are more serious. The pacing felt a little bit off — there is a sequence early on that had me flipping through pages far past my bedtime, but things felt much slower after that, till the final battle. Not quite as compelling Some Desperate Glory, but fans of the genre will love it.

Highlights
~the BEST reason for no-phones-in-class
~a possessed photocopier
~swords > guns
~teachers as paladins
~never trust a dude who’s not peer-reviewed!

INSTANT new fave, EASILY a best-of-the-year, and I am officially declaring Incandescent the definitory example of the magic school trope!

Incandescent is very obviously in conversation with other big-name magic school books, and with the readers who fell in love with the trope (sub-genre?) as children. But those readers have since grown up, and so this is a book for adults; written with, not just an adult’s perspective on the school and students of this particular story, but with an adult’s perspective on the concept of magic school. And by choosing to set the book in England, firmly within the institution that is British Private Education, Incandescent stands as a very self-aware foil to the-series-that-must-not-be-named, specifically.

Plus, the use of magic as a not-too-subtle metaphor for wealth and or privilege??? With natural sorcerers as stand-ins for those one-in-a-gazillion ‘normal’ people who make it by ‘pulling themselves up by the bootstraps’ (aka freak luck)??? My gods, I can’t believe how simply, elegantly, and perfectly well-done that was! *chef’s kiss* Tesh is a GENIUS.

And that would be enough to make it a really excellent book, but there’s a whole ‘nother level of excellence to the fact that Tesh manages to rip apart this fantasy without ripping apart those who love it. Is the whole concept of British boarding schools deeply problematic? Yep! In a whole lot of ways! Are there very dodgy elements and connotations to most aspects of the magic school trope? Ohhh yes. But Tesh leaves room to acknowledge that these facts do not negate what people love about these schools, British or magical (or both); to explore how people can love them, how these things can be deeply meaningful to individuals, flaws and all. This is not a book that browbeats you for enjoying something problematic; it is, instead, a book that asks you to look at the thing you love straight-on, to see it wholly and unbiasedly, to know what it is you love.

If you still love it after that? That’s your business. Incandescent did not seem, to me, to be pushing an agenda, to be guiding readers to a specific conclusion. It just wants you to see, and to be honest about what you see. Don’t love blindly. That’s all.

Which is all very High Brow and philosophical, but Incandescent isn’t just a deeply clever, incisive book: it’s also a genuinely entertaining novel, a freaking BLAST of a read that I could not put down and did not want to! So much of it made me laugh; more than one moment had me kicking my feet; there were a lot of happy-rambles to the hubby about the cleverness of the writing and the very neat worldbuilding; and there was a great deal of flailing, both the delighted kind and the very anxious kind!

>“Oh shit,” said Nikki, staring at the streaks of black and yellow paint.

Will paused.

“Language,” said Aneeta, with a glance in Walden’s direction.

“Actually,” Walden said serenely, “‘Oh shit’ is the correct reaction to finding an error in an incursion ward.”<

Walden is the deputy headmistress and Director of Magic at Chetwood Academy, responsible not just for teaching high-level magic, but for the magical protections of the school. And – this is really important – she loves her job. She loves magic, and she loves teaching, and she loves Chetwood, and all that love just emanates from the pages. Incandescent reads very much like a love letter to teaching and teachers; it gives the book an occasionally bizarrely wholesome feel, almost cosy at times. All of the staff at Chetwood seem to love what they do – even when things are hard, when students are badly misbehaving or suffering or having to fight off being eaten by their phones, there’s a joy and satisfaction to all of it. It’s almost enough to tempt me to go into teaching!

>Teaching wasn’t about being right, or being clever, or being in charge. It was about making them believe.

You manipulate his perceptions, the [spoiler!] said, to make him stronger.<

And again – in the same way that Incandescent is a conversation with all of us as adults who were kids reading the-series-that-must-not-be-named…it’s also talking to all of us as adults who were kids in school. Any school. If you went back to high school and talked to your favourite teacher now, as an adult, it might feel a bit like reading Incandescent does: like we’re getting a tour behind the curtain that is/was our childhood schooling, and wow is there a lot we never imagined existed back there! It feels like a teacher addressing you adult-to-adult, revelatory and mundane at once; there is something fascinating in learning a little of how teachers perform a role when in the presence of their students, or in the realisation that oh yes, they feel awkward and silly and uncool too, all those things you thought teachers were somehow immune to.

Which all means that even the most banal bits of Walden’s day feel like we’re being let in on mysterious, magical secrets. Tesh’s prose is so readable, quick and compelling and precise, always giving us exactly the right amount of detail about exactly the right things, perfectly balancing moments of introspection with wonderfully human dialogue and heart-pounding action – though maybe ‘activity’ would be a better word, because it’s not all action-thriller stuff, but even the littler moments feel vital and meaningful.

>“No blood,” said Walden firmly. A meal of human bodily fluids was the fastest possible way ot turn a minor demonic possession into a major demonic problem. “Would you accept a digestive biscuit?”

The fiery flecks of the purple eyes in the depths of the multipurpose tray flickered. The imp said, with an air of deep cunning, Chocolate.<

And fun. Incandescent is so much fun! I loved the teenagers and their shenanigans; I loved the surprises embedded in the worldbuilding; and I was surprised at how much I loved the English setting. Clearly I’ve been reading too many books set in the US! I’m not saying it made me nostalgic (gods forbid) but it did make me some strange kind of delighted to see all the familiar Briticisms, the school system I grew up in, the terminology I remember and still default to; Year Nines, A-Levels, digestive biscuits!

But it also made me really happy to see that setting called out.

<Mark was exactly the kind of person that Chetwood School existed to create: powerful, free, capable of anything, capable of getting away with anything.<

This is not a cosy fantasy, even if parts of it are heart-warming. Incandescent is a book about power and who has it, who can have it, what it costs (what it costs different people). It’s an incisive, merciless vivisection of capitalist power structures, of buying power via buying schooling, of a rancid, rotting system of education that was built to support and feed into the British Empire and is still deeply imperfect. It’s about arrogance and wealth and privilege, and how people without any of those things mortgage their souls to get their children a chance at them–

>Chetwood’s school fees were insurance money, a policy taken out against the future. Let my child be safe. Let my child be happy. Let my child have every single chance at freedom, joy, hope, power.<

Incandescent is condemnation and sympathy: for those who built the system on one hand, and for those who beggar themselves to get their children a better place in that system. It’s an acknowledgement that even once we realise how fucked up this all is, we can’t necessarily get ourselves free of it. We should burn it all down and start over – but we can’t.

>the sheer weight of institution carving patterns into the world, stronger than blood or bone.<

There is a deep well of something like cynicism in Incandescent, an awareness of a great and toxic ugliness at the heart of what Walden loves so much. There were times when it seemed to me that Tesh was even pointing out how messed up schools are, not as a fundamental part of the institutions of power but as a way of teaching at all. Exams are a terrible way to gauge a child’s intelligence! Boarding schools are functionally prisons for minors! We constantly undervalue people who are geniuses at their Things just because they never went to school for it! All of it dressed up in elaborate ritual and civility, when really, the simple, savage brutality the demons in this setting constantly enact on each other is only a more honest mirror of the machinations amongst humans – amongst the worst humans, anyway. Which is probably a big part of why Incandescent has been called dark academia in so many corners…

But it’s not, really. Because Incandescent is also about believing in something much bigger than you, greater than you. It’s about dedicating yourself to an ideal, and spending your entire life working to live up to it, to manifest it, to remake the world in its image, one student at a time. It’s about teachers as paladins, about teaching as – as something holy. Which is not quite the right word, but is so close.

What else can you call being willing to die to protect the children in your charge – children who are not your flesh and blood, even? (But maybe have more of you in them than they do their parents, after spending most of their lives in your classrooms.)

>And a certainty: this is what I have done. Here is power, and here are power’s consequences. I can point to them. I can name them. Here is the child who knows today what she did not know yesterday. She will take her knowledge away into adulthood and find her own terrible strength there. Those are her choices. These, circumscribed, limited by ancient stone and crumbling concrete, by time and tradition and school bells and school boundaries–these are mine.<

I feel like I could go on and on endlessly: this is a book I would love to offer to a classroom of English Lit enthusiasts, because there is so much to it, so many layers, and all of them fitted so perfectly together, like the gears of the world’s tiniest clock. It’s the kind of book that rewards analysis, that delights in you thinking deeply about it, that encourages you to. I want to write you an essay about the worldbuilding (simple at first glance, so freaking clever when you pause to think about it) or the foursome that are Walden’s top students (they each represent a different perspective/experience on/of modern schooling) or how amazingly complicated, multi-faceted, and believably contradictory a character Walden is (I straight-up love her and there’s nothing straight about it) – but you should really just READ THE BOOK FOR YOURSELF!

Incandescent is, simply, incandescent.

Emily Tesh's The Incandescent is Tesh's take on the dark academia genre. Fans of Naomi Novik's Scholomance series (which I'm also a fan of) should find a lot to enjoy here as Tesh centers the action through the perspective of Dr. Saphire "Saffy" Walden, Chetwood School of Magic. I appreciated the centering of a story on a woman in her '30s since so many of these titles are about the children and how they navigate their magical surroundings. I recently read through Tesh's "Some Desperate Glory" and found this new title much more engaging throughout. If you liked that previous novel, chances are you'll like this one even more.