BelEdit Book Reviews
The Incandescent is a good choice for anyone who loves magical realism, especially magic in school settings, but who’s looking for adult rather than young adult (YA) fiction.
I was trying something new with The Incandescent — I usually like my magical realism with more realism than magic. I am also not the target audience (waaaay too old!). So although the description intrigued me, I was out of my comfort zone here.
Which made this one quite hard to get into, initially. It felt very new to me and I had to concentrate hard in the early chapters to take in the magic education I was getting. The protagonist, Dr Sapphire (Saffy) Walden, is Director of Magic at a centuries-old boarding school in the south of England. Immersing myself in her life at the school, I did feel like I was following lessons at times!
Despite all of the unfamiliarity and my learning curve, I sank into the narrative and enjoyed it. While a lot of the characters were teenagers, and all of them were decades younger than me, it did not read like a YA novel. Dr Walden is a sufficiently complex adult character to hold my attention. And I actually enjoyed the details of her everyday life; she is in charge of a school that brings with it very special responsibilities, not least warding off demons poised to devour all the students and staff if its security is breached. Both her magical strengths and normal human weaknesses are well portrayed, and her relationships ring true. Dr Walden, initially a strong and confident figure, goes through a series of challenges that bring her face to face with existential questions around privilege, power, self-image and relationships.
Tesh is a teacher so perhaps it’s no surprise that she understands young people! The older teenage characters in The Incandescent are well rounded and interesting. On the cusp of legal adulthood, they are at that age where any source of stress or high emotion can plunge them back into childishness or bring out the adult that they are becoming. The way their teachers struggle to navigate their charges’ elusive, shifting characters is insightful and well described.
I loved that the story is set in a world that is our own world, today, except that magic is an integral part of it. The explanations of the difficulties of managing demons in the modern world – because they have a tendency to get into mobile phones, printers and other electronic devices, which are now ubiquitous – were particularly entertaining.
In terms of literary merit, I very much appreciated Tesh’s strong writing skills. The Incandescent is well written, well paced, with unique and realistic characters, and a gripping story including several edge-of-your-seat dramatic scenes.
Balancing out the pros (story/characters/narrative style) and cons (not-my-genre/learning curve), for me it was a 3-star read. Readers in the book’s target audience, and more versed in magical genre fiction, will probably get more out of it than I did, so for that I give it 4 stars.
My thanks to the author, the publisher and Netgalley for giving me a free copy of this book. All my reviews are 100% honest and unbiased, regardless of how I acquire the book.