Two years ago I reviewed Emily’s last book, Some Desperate Glory (review here) which was a science fiction novel. I liked a lot of it, although my general impression at the end was that it was a little predictable and – gasp! -overrated. But what do I know – Some Desperate Glory then went on to win the Hugo Award for the Best Novel for 2023!
Nevertheless, despite my reservations there was a lot of it I liked, so when this new book arrived for review, I was intrigued, mainly because it sounded like it was going to be different. And so it is – The Incandescent is an urban fantasy set in the now of 2025. Think Harry Potter, but with Emily’s spin on it.
From the publisher: “Dr Walden is the Director of Magic at Chetwood School and one of the most powerful magicians in England. Her days consist of meetings, teaching A-Level Invocation to four talented, chaotic sixth formers, more meetings and securing the school’s boundaries from demonic incursions.
Walden is good at her job – no, Walden is great at her job. But demons are masters of manipulation. It’s her responsibility to keep her school with its six hundred students and centuries-old legacy safe. But it’s possible the entity Walden most needs to keep her school safe from . . . is herself.”
Let’s get the obvious Hogwarts comparisons out of the way first. Yes, this is a story about a private school who are teaching children and young adults’ magic. But really there the comparisons stop. This is clearly a book for grown-ups, written from the perspective of adults and with all the sensibilities that experienced adults provide.
Focused around Dr Sapphire (Saffy) Walden, Director of Magic at the school, the plot gives us her experiences of being an ex-pupil and a teacher, as well as a manager – she is, as the book explains, an “academic turned educator turned school management”, which gives us a unique perspective to the school over time.
“The difference between a schoolchild and a schoolteacher, one of Walden’s mentors had once remarked, is that a teacher who finds herself miserable at school can leave.”
It is this that makes the book work for me. It also helps that the book is literate and intelligent, with nuanced characters that felt honest and also have depth and resonance. The actions of those we meet seem genuine – not forced, and cobbled together for the sake of a plot point, but as people would do say and react if such an environment was actual.
“Teaching wasn’t about being right, or being clever, or being in charge. It was about making them believe.”
Through Saffy Tesh makes the important point that there are major, major benefits in being a teacher – the positives of teaching, of developing professional relationships, of helping young people learn and grow, even with the added complication of having magic involved. It would be easy to just spend most of the book telling the reader about Saffy’s love for the job, and the students she teaches and whilst the novel does do that, in terms of plot much of the book is also about how Saffy herself develops over the course of the novel.
The flipside of this is that there is also a lot of trials and tribulations of being a teacher, even without the magic element. With the tension of potential OFSTED inspections, lesson observations, endless meetings, preparation and marking and so on, the academic year progresses and embeds the fantasy element in some semblance of normality. The pressures these cause were spot-on – and I say that with nearly 40 years of experiencing such things in both state and public schools myself.
We also have the magic element, of course. Much of Saffy’s work involves maintaining the wards around the school, ensuring that the nasty demons being kept at bay stay that way. There are minor imps around the school that leaven the dark atmosphere a little – for example, the Gremlin-esque imp in the school photocopier may cause some wry moments to anyone that has had issues with such a machine – but the nasty ones on the whole are really nasty, giving a sense of genuine peril to the characters, both teenage and adult.
As if teaching wasn’t enough, as a manager as well as a teacher Saffy has a lot of additional administrational tasks to do, magic as well as mundane. Dealing with difficult colleagues as well as students is part of the job, and Saffy finds a number of them irksome. In particular, Laura Kenning, the commander of the Marshals (a kind of magic police force) at Chetwood, seems to really get under her skin. So too the arrival of a new member of staff given the task of overseeing the school after a major magical incident there, both of which affect Saffy’s professional and personal life.
All of these elements are fixed into a setting that feels appropriate. I was pleasantly surprised how well the book’s setting worked. Chetwood feels like a real school, whose long history and attractive countryside setting adds to the book a great deal. There’s a lot of backstory for both the history of Chetwood School with its 600+ years of magic, and its adult characters which I enjoyed a great deal. (I would love to read more stories from Chetwood’s past.)
The upshot of all of this is that these elements work together to create a realistic feel to the events of the novel – and I say that knowing that I’m talking about an urban fantasy. When romance becomes part of the mixture, I did feel at times that the book should be subtitled “The Life and Loves of Saffy Walden”, although it does humanise Saffy somewhat. it’s well done on the whole, even when I felt it made the book more of a soap opera – Saffy’s romances in the book create a tension that is straight out of the “will they – won’t they” playbook.
All of these elements drive the book forward, and should keep you reading until the end. The main issue I had was towards the end when I felt that some of the things in the final scenes were perhaps a little too convenient in wrapping things up. The denouement was not bad – but not quite as effective as I hoped it was going to be after such a careful set up. I will also say that the title doesn’t really work for me, although I accept that that may be a personal bug-bear.
Nevertheless, in summary, The Incandescent is a book that for me was a major, major improvement on what Tesh has written before. Although there were elements that didn’t quite earn it the very top marks from me, as a sort of British version of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians it is one of the best books I’ve read this year and certainly one of the best urban fantasies I’ve read in years. For anyone wanting to try dark academia or simply enjoy a fresh and original take on it, The Incandescent is recommended from me as one of the best in a currently popular sub-genre.
© 2025 Mark Yon
Hardback | Orbit Books
THE INCANDESCENT by Emily Tesh
May 2025 | 432 pages
ISBN: 978 035 6525 648
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Orbit Books, UK.
