Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent did not quite work for me, for reasons that may not be entirely fair to it, but it’s still very interesting.
This is a magical boarding school book, but from the point of view of a teacher and administrator, not a student. It is strongly in conversation with Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy (which I never wrote up, but which I find compulsively readable despite holding several serious grudges against it) and, through that, with Harry Potter etc. etc.
The very concept of magical boarding school but tired middle-aged teacher is absolutely perfect, and Tesh (who used to teach) does this part of it beautifully well. And you know that I love me an unreliable narrator, and Tesh is extremely good at that (I never wrote up her prior novel, Some Desperate Glory, but it’s a banger and I highly recommend it, not least on those grounds).
My problem was that the plot requires accepting two major propositions, and I felt that was one too many. As I said, this may be unfair: they were both of the same nature, and one was explicitly explained in the text in ways that made sense, so you’d think that I could take the other one as the price of admission. But the one that was explained in the text, I still spent a lot of time mentally yelling about even though it made sense, and I didn’t have any goodwill left over for the price-of-admission one.
Nevertheless, if the premise sounds appealing, give it a try.
Finally, a note for those who’ve read the book: "You are, in fact, self-actualising! Well done!" is the very best thing ever. For that alone, I don’t regret reading the book.