Review: The Incandescent

It’s hard to be a grown-up. Beyond the usual looming death and taxes, sometimes it feels like speculative fiction revolves around 16-year-old chosen ones saving the world. While my Buffy DVDs will surely be joining me in the old folks’ home, it’s still nice to find a protagonist who thinks about the work email they need to send as they drift to sleep. The Incandescent by Emily Tesh is just such a book. While it’s been lauded as the next Scholomance (an excellent series, by the way), Tesh’s latest book is quite different. This is a book for grown-ups. This is a book that knows about the pains of filling out yet another form and knowing your closest adult relationships are with your coworkers. This is a book that remembers teenagers, why it was so delightful to be one, and why no one should ever want to be one again. It looks back on those times and considers what our grown-up protagonist has learned and how they have and haven’t changed. 

The Incandescent tells the story of Doctor Walden, Director of Magic, Chetwood School. Her day-to-day is filled with meetings, emails, and teaching invocation to upper sixth form. She is also responsible for keeping demons in their own demonic plane while all of the student magic on campus draws them to the school. Lowly imps may be permitted to live in the photocopiers, but there are much more powerful demons waiting for their opportunity to cross over to the mundane world. Dr. Walden, a specialist in the magical subfield of invocation (i.e. invoking demons) is well-educated in all of the relevant theories and superbly trained in keeping those demons at bay. She perhaps is not as skilled at having a full social and emotional life, but she’s very skilled at her work and for her that is enough. 

It’s clear that Tesh is intimately familiar with education and academia. She appropriately describes the archives/archivist as distinct from the library/librarian, which is a serious giveaway. More than that, though, she fills her world with a real sense of magical history. There are both quirks of history and theories behind whether someone is a “magician,” a “sorcerer,” or a “witch;” there is disagreement over appropriate terms and their meaning. There are practices that have fallen out of fashion, as well as a clear distinction between academically trained magical practices and vocational ones. And while the demonic plane exists to some measure beyond our ken, demons themselves have been academically defined and divvied into specific classes and ranks. 

The author’s style has a lovely touch of light wittiness and sarcasm. I penned “lol” into my print copy of the book at least once a chapter, because I also am a grown-up (aka old person). The read itself is smooth and somehow manages not to be bogged down by the references to academic lingo and bureaucracy. Though a warning for fellow readers who are most familiar with the U.S. educational and governmental systems: you may find yourself tempted to run down a number of rabbit holes pertaining to things like “NQT” and “Ofsted” and how financial aid works at the university level in the United Kingdom. If you aren’t completely obsessed with school supplies, you may, like me, have to look up “lever arch folders” after they are mentioned more than once. Just don’t do what I did and look up “DThau” on the assumption that you will find a real world answer.

Dr. Walden, being the consummate competent protagonist when it comes to magic, is an excellent guide through this world and the flavor of her voice when she disagrees about some theory or practice is fantastic. Her lack of confidence when it comes to emotional interactions coupled with such strong concepts about teaching methods and academic concerns gives her wonderful depth. As Tesh tells this story from Walden’s perspective, some of the secondary characters don’t have the depth that Walden has. The sixth form students as they are introduced read a bit like stereotypes of high schoolers. But this is a minor quibble, and the story doesn’t particularly suffer for it. This is Walden’s story after all, and part of the point is her lack of emotional connections at the start. 

The Incandescence, beyond the excellent story, has thematic depth. Walden’s emotional growth throughout develops as she examines her different selves—the faces she puts on and the ways in which she connects (or doesn’t) with others. Here, Tesh also looks at trauma, but rather than delving into backstory-defining trauma that is often found following many a 16-year-old protagonist, Tesh instead takes a more realistic shine to the topic and dives into the long-lasting and lingering impacts of witnessing something traumatizing, something that many of her readers have likely experienced. Walden faces that trauma and moves past it, growing in ways that her younger self didn’t know how to.

Finally, with a light touch, Tesh guides the reader through Walden’s awakening to an understanding of class and power. As a highly educated product of private schooling, Walden begins to face her own biases and how she has benefited from a system of privileges. Her growth throughout the book is done quite well, without ever feeling as though Tesh is preaching to the reader; instead Walden’s growth, both emotional and intellectual, feels like a natural progression.

Overall, The Incandescence by Emily Tesh has solid pacing, an excellent protagonist who grows throughout the book, and a story built just for us grown-ups. If you’re one of those, or if you aspire to be one of those, or if you used to be one of those, I highly recommend.

Recommended Reads 

• Scholomance Series by Naomi Novik
• Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey
• Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth
• A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

©2025 K. Stoll Farrell

K. Stoll Farrell is an academic librarian by day, working in library publishing. They believe in the power of speculative fiction to create change. They also believe that change is hard and would sometimes prefer to curl up on the couch with their family, dogs, and a knitting project.