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zilliah 's review for:
The Incandescent
by Emily Tesh
This book wasn't bad, but despite having a lot of elements I usually enjoy, just didn't click with me. The main issue I had was how she blended magic and ordinary life. Usually that's something I love, but the difficulty was that while ordinary life affected magic, magic didn't really have much of an impact on ordinary life. (This is a bit of an oversimplification, but I'm talking about overall vibes, not details here.)
For example, the book opens withthe main character filling out a safety form to summon a demon for a lab class. Great! I love when mundane things are needed for magic! The book is full of things like this, when magic classes are slotted alongside science classes, etc, which usually I find so fun.
But there's never any flow back in the other direction: magic doesn't seem to have had any real impact on how the school is run, the way the world works, or anything outside the classroom really. The magic is very siloed and used in particular ways by particular people, but even for those people it doesn't seem to impact much outside of their jobs. Magic doesn't make anything easier or more interesting, it feels just as dreary as the other crappy aspects of teaching the character complains about. There's no joy in magic - even the main character, who is an extremely skilled magician, only seems to get academic pride and self importance out of it.
Honestly, this book kind of bummed me out. I think it's a good book, and the right person would probably love it, but it just really didn't work for me, even though I really wanted it to. (As an aside, I LOVED her other novel, some desperate glory, I think because her writing style felt much more suited to that sort of story.)
Also, I am entirely too gay to have any sympathy forthe main character's interest in the shitty posh guy, omg I am fully on the side of the lesbian characters there , so I found that whole aspect both annoying and unappealing. Which I know was kind of the point, but....eugh.
For example, the book opens with
But there's never any flow back in the other direction: magic doesn't seem to have had any real impact on how the school is run, the way the world works, or anything outside the classroom really. The magic is very siloed and used in particular ways by particular people, but even for those people it doesn't seem to impact much outside of their jobs. Magic doesn't make anything easier or more interesting, it feels just as dreary as the other crappy aspects of teaching the character complains about. There's no joy in magic - even the main character, who is an extremely skilled magician, only seems to get academic pride and self importance out of it.
Honestly, this book kind of bummed me out. I think it's a good book, and the right person would probably love it, but it just really didn't work for me, even though I really wanted it to. (As an aside, I LOVED her other novel, some desperate glory, I think because her writing style felt much more suited to that sort of story.)
Also, I am entirely too gay to have any sympathy for