The thing about The Incandescent by Emily Tesh as a novel about a magic boarding school in England is that it’s told from the adults’ point of view, adults who take their responsibilities seriously, and who have real lives that are separate from what is happening to the students. Boarding-school stories often assign the teachers archetypical roles: antagonists, mentors, the clueless, the helpful, the well-meaning but bumbling, strict but with a heart of gold, and so on. In all of these coming-of-age stories, the teachers and staff are foils, there to play a role for the students to whom the tale really belongs. But in any school, the teachers are usually there long after any particular group of students has graduated and gone on with the rest of their lives. They have a different perspective on school life, and Tesh drew on her own experience as a teacher to write a magic boarding-school novel, but for grown-ups.

As The Incandescent opens, Dr Sapphire Walden, Saffy to friends and most colleagues, has been Director of Magic at Chetwood School for three years, and she has brought a bit more order to the Faculty of Magic that has improved the incident statistics that she tracks. Much magic in the book’s world involves summoning demons, extradimensional beings that have capabilities in the mundane world, and that also want nothing more than to stay in the world and consume as much magic and life force as they can while here. Magicians are a constant source of danger; adolescent and partly trained magicians even more so. A school full of young and barely controlled magicians is a happy hunting ground, and a big part of Saffy’s job is to keep the kids safe. Tesh shows how much care teachers take in how they look after students, heightened by the magic.

Chetwood is what an English boarding school is meant to be: centuries of history, sometimes an awkward fit in modern society, plenty of tradition but enough adaptation to have kept going through the many many years. There are old stone chapels and a Brutalist building from the 1960s; there are multi-generation Chetwood families, and students from newly immigrated families there on scholarship; old money rubs along with new money; and everywhere teenagers and younger children growing up amid all the contradictions. Saffy herself is an alum of the school, with a complicated history. She’s happy to be back and to have found a role, but also unhappy not to have gone further in the world of magical research, the world where she earned her doctorate and where she expected to be breaking new ground.

Then of course things start to go wrong.

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