Emily Tesh won the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novel for Some Desperate Glory, which I really enjoyed. So I was very much looking forward to The Incandescent. While Some Desperate Glory was a science fiction novel about fascism, The Incandescent is a magic school novel—so quite different in terms of genre, though I think animated by some common concerns.
Harry Potter didn't invent the magic school novel, of course, but there's a generation of readers and writers for whom it did. Some of these probably pretty much reproduce the tropes of the genre as is, but many others take the features and project of the genre and complicate them. Naomi Novik's Scholomance books, for example, clearly has as their starting point the question, "Why would you send your kid to a school where the students are always dying?" Moniquill Blackgoose's To Shape a Dragon's Breath uses a Native American character to explore questions of class and race and privilege that J. K. Rowling pushes to the side. As Nicole Schrag astutely points out, the school novel is usually about the school changing the student, and so Blackgoose purposefully writes a school novel where the student protagonist is resolutely unchanged.
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh |
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Originally published: 2025 Acquired: May 2026 Read: June 2026 |
The Incandescent's tweak on the genre is that it tells the magic school story from the perspective of the teachers, as opposed to the students. This seems so obvious once you say it, yet as far as I know, no one has ever made this move before.
Genre, famously, has two level: features and project. The first of those means the things that appear in the story, the things that let you know you're looking at a school story. (For example, this book has the obligatory scene where the kids think about going to an adult, but don't, though it provides a nice explanation as to why.) Related to this, I think, is the pleasure of what China Miéville calls "rationalized alienation": a world that is not your world, but is nonetheless built on rational lines. Tesh introduces that quite clearly from the opening, which is about risk assessment forms... for a magic lab! A lot of the pleasure of the book, as a teacher myself, is seeing the world of teaching accurately rendered. I can believe that if magic was real, it would work like this. (At a fancy British prep school, anyway.) It's a lot like the pleasure I get out of reading Novik's Temeraire novels. (Which is funny, because for all they think through how a magic school would "really" work, Novik's own Scholomance novels just remove the entire idea of teachers! On the other hand, Tesh's conception of magical demons seems to owe a bit to Novik's.)
There are lots of clever bit: demons occupy small living things. But they can also occupy objects people treat like living things. Swear at your copy machine enough, and a demon can reside in it. Thus, mobile phones represent a huge threat vector. As Saffy says to one of her students, that means her students are at threat in a way she never was, because her students have phones on them at all times since middle school. Which is literally true in the world of the story but also obviously a metaphor for ours!
If this is all the book did, it would be a good book. But genre also works on the level of project: what is the story doing? What point is it trying to make by flipping around how the school story usually operates? I think there's two things The Incandescent is up to, both related to the purpose of education. The purpose of education if you're a student in a school story, is self-actualization: like most YA fiction, it's about working out your place in the universe.
But is that what education is for from the perspective of the adults? Does a parent send a student to school for self-actualization; does a teacher teach self-actualization? Arguably not. "'Character' was one of the things that every school claimed to instil and that no school could really control" (406). But if not self-actualization, then what?
As our protagonist Saffy reflects: "no one was paying for magical boarding school because of the magic.... No: 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 possible chance at freedom, joy, hope, power." She goes on to say, "You could never completely future-proof your children. But power would keep them safe from the bitter grind of survival in a way nothing else could" (325). I've seen some criticisms that The Incandescent's setting of an elite private magical school seems unnecessary and elitist... but it's fundamental to what the book is doing. All of the adult characters we see here have parlayed or are parlaying their education into power: Saffy, Laura, Mark. Making it into a magic school literalizes that aspect of education. Making it into an elite school heightens that aspect of how the novel plays with the genre: it just wouldn't be as significant if Saffy was teaching at, say, a public comprehensive or something. As she remarks much later, "Mark was exactly the kind of person that Chetwood School existed to create: powerful, free, capable of anything, capable of getting away with anything" (401).
But... Placing our late 30s protagonist among all these teenagers highlights how that's true. In the passage I'm quoting above, I think Saffy sees that as bit of a bad thing; it goes on to say, "And you became old, and strong, and terrible" (352). But it's not all bad—as Saffy herself figures out by the end of the novel, it would be terrible if we never did become new people, if we were always stuck being who we are when we enter adulthood. That always can become a new self is probably the greatest blessing we have as human beings. "You're never too old to learn" (414).
It's well-written, does some clever stuff with form, and is genuinely exciting. I have one plot quibble (it's hard to believe Laura was never briefed about Old Faithful given it killed multiple students!), but I really enjoyed this book. The best Hugo finalist I've read so far.
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