The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

Started reading: 3/14/26

Finished reading: 3/17/26

Rating: 5 out of 5

One-liner: Doctor Walden is a lot of things: teacher, magician, adult. What she never thought she would be is a danger to the magical school that she runs.

Favorite quote: “She wouldn’t say that,” Laura says.

“Perhaps not. But she would think it.” You smile. “Did you know that?”

Genre: Magical fantasy/mystery

Thoughts: This is a brilliant book. It is nothing I expected when I finally picked it up. I had high hopes for this story. Emily Tesh's last novel, Some Desperate Glory, is my all-time favorite book, so I was both supremely excited to begin this one and very scared that it would not live up to the expectations I had already placed on it. Emily Tesh struck gold here. This is such a refreshing take on the magical school plot, because yes, there are magical children, and yes, they are important, but they are not The story. The story is Walden and her relationships with other people. If anyone else had written this book, Old Faithful would have been the climax-cincher, the big bad who only got defeated in the final few pages, but here, under Emily Tesh's pen, Old Faithful is simply the beginning of the problems Walden is about to face. This is a grief-filled story about a woman who has spent her life trying to make up for a death she caused, and it is a story about figuring out who you are when you're past the age where that's supposed to be solved, and it is, somehow, also a love story.