{"id":3041,"date":"2026-07-03T21:05:53","date_gmt":"2026-07-04T01:05:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/?p=3041"},"modified":"2026-07-04T08:30:53","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T12:30:53","slug":"tesh-emily-the-incandescent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2026\/07\/tesh-emily-the-incandescent\/","title":{"rendered":"Tesh, Emily: The Incandescent<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nEmily Tesh’s The Incandescent<\/em><\/strong> did not quite work for me, for reasons that may not be entirely fair to it, but it’s still very interesting.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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<\/em>, but it’s a banger and I highly recommend it, not least on those grounds). <\/p>\n

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<\/em> it made sense, and I didn’t have any goodwill left over for the price-of-admission one.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, if the premise sounds appealing, give it a try. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Tesh, Emily: The Incandescent<\/cite>“<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,15],"tags":[481],"class_list":["post-3041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-sf-and-fantasy","tag-tesh-emily"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3041"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3049,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3041\/revisions\/3049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}