The Incandescent

The Incandescent has established itself as one of the more popular Fantasy novels of 2025, at least in the corners of the internet I frequent. I knew I’d get around to reading it eventually; as a teacher protagonist, I love seeing magic schools turned on their head, and it doesn’t happen often! This book is a great choice for anyone remotely interested in the premise, and feels like a fairly safe pick for people looking for an introduction to modern Urban Fantasy. If you want demons, snarky kids, (possibly) competent adults doing adult things, then look no further!

Elevator Pitch:
At a prestigious British boarding school, Doctor Walden oversees the magical education department. Mostly this involves safety plans, keeping the school’s wards in tact, bullying the photocopyer imp into doing its job, and teaching a few high level courses in demonic summoning and negotiation. She’s got some wickedly smart students, and a Marshall who is both exceedingly attractive and also breathing down her neck about the safety of children summoning demons. She’s got to balance her students’ misadventures, her own stress levels, an ancient demon lurking beneath the school, and whether or not she’s at all interested in pursuing a relationship with a coworker.

What Worked for Me:
When I reviewed Three Meant to Be (similarly a high school magic teacher protagonist and very much worth a read), I found the book didn’t quite hit my desire to see my own profession represented in fantasy. I felt a lot more seen in The Incandescent, and think it nailed the vibes of teaching better. I’m still holding out hope that I someday get a depiction of teaching that doesn’t involve working 16 hour days, but I think this book will be a good fit for the average reader who is looking for a magic school story from a teacher’s perspective. Walden spends a lot of time talking about safety precautions. While things go wrong (it wouldn’t be a good book if they didn’t) it takes the opposite approach from the typical school setting, which almost universally seem indifferent about the mortal danger their children are in at all times.

Walden herself is an enjoyable character. She’s a great example of how to create unreliable narrator: she’s got a fairly strong perspective on things, but you are constantly aware that its her perspective, not presented as a universal truth. In particular, I thought the tension between her claims about safety mixed with some of the tangible actions she takes to be a clear indicator that, while impressive, Walden isn’t as infallible as she’d want the reader to believe. I think this element was handled deftly, and wove in nicely with some of the twists and reveals from throughout the book, even if I thought the twists were a hair on the transparent side.

Our core cast of students in Walden’s class were fun as well. You’ve got the billiant orphan dripping with main-character energy, a mundane kid who is doing magic coursework to show off, a rich nepo-kid who likes to roll his eyes, and a kid rescued from a cult with self-confidence issues. They don’t steal the show, but it was nice that they weren’t so over the top as to ruin the more grounded approach to magical schools. It felt very much like a real high school, and the group was exceedingly small, but felt pretty realistic for kids who are effectively taking advanced placement classes. They made stupid choices, but weren’t the caricature of raging hormones that adult books sometimes portray teenagers as, which was nice.

Overall, this story was good. Pacing was nice, fun twists, solid characters. I want to credit it with some tonal and plot choices that I wasn’t expecting at all, which was a pleasant surprise. An enjoyable read, with a level of toothiness that pushes it beyond popcorn-read territory, but not by much. It didn’t blow me away or get me to rearrange my list of all time favorites, but it’s a workhorse book that will appeal to a fairly broad section of fantasy readers.

What Didn’t Work for Me:
While I found Walden and the kids to mostly feel believable, Walden’s relationship with Kenning (the head Warden of the school) to be a fault point in the story. They’ve worked together for four years, rather closely too, since they both spend a lot of time on student safety. And yet it still feels like they’re fumbling their way through basic human interactions like people who just met, and Walden seems to only now be realizing that Kenning is hot and potentially interested. It just didn’t feel like it lined up, which then sucked a lot of air out of the budding romance present in the first half of the story. The resolution of the romance plot that eventually came to be had some issues as well, with Walden sacrificing previously held core values in one brief conversation. Generally speaking, the romance was a miss in this book. However, it wasn’t a forefront of the plotting, and her romantic and sexual relationships taken more broadly across her life (we meet or hear about for partners, present and past) made for a much more compelling picture.

I think this book also struggled a little bit with thematic integrity. Tesh is interested in acknowledging, if perhaps not fully exploring, the role of class in British boarding schools, as well as education more broadly. Similarly, there was a lot of surface level discussions of how Marshall and Academic magic both look down on each other but miss what makes each side good at what they do. Again, nothing mind blowing that I haven’t seen before. She wasn’t particularly interested in the question of police in schools, however. Now, my bias here is worth acknowledging. This is a rather hot-button topic in America (and one that transcends political party, with people on both ends of the political spectrum arguing on each side), and I have no idea what they dynamics around policing in schools looks like in Britain – where both the book is set and Tesh grew up. However, when there are armed and dangerous guards who won’t hesitate to kill you if your fledgling magic goes wrong … I would anticipate that would cause at least some tension with the students. Generally speaking, this book didn’t seem interested in pushing very far into thematic territory, which can be fine (beach reads are great!) but in this case it felt a bit like this story wanted to confront Big Topics without losing the cosy ‘Hogwarts but if Professor McGonnagal was the protagonist’ vibe.

Conclusion: a good read that was a fun take on magic schools, especially if you’re looking for something on the lighter or more readable side of the genre.

• Characters: 3
• Worldbuilding: 4
• Craft: 3
• Themes: 2
• Enjoyment: 4