My god, but this is good! As I said the other day, Emily Tesh seems like she’s just dropped out of a clear blue sky in the last few years and taken the science fiction and fantasy worlds by storm with her previous novel and now this one.
We’re in a magic school. It’s a boarding school in the Home Counties of England. A public school, in the English1 sense, with all that implies about class and wealth, privilege and entitlement. Those issues are addressed in the story, to some degree. There are bursaries, children who are ‘wards of the school’, and so on.
And magic and demons and possession and all sorts of things. It’s the present day, and entities from the demonic plane are drawn to systems, to complexity. There’s an imp possessing the photocopier, and it’s dangerous to turn on your phone in an area where there’s a lot of magic about.
And it’s a story for adults, so we get love and sex and risk-assessment forms and all those sorts of things, too. The viewpoint character is a teacher, the Director of Magic. She’s very, very, good at her job. The magic aspects of it, especially. But sometimes it takes more than being good at magic to save the school. Or the world.
By the time I was about halfway through this I was hoping Tesh had a sequel planned. Maybe several sequels. A magic school is going to be there a long time, after all (this one is already 600 years old), so why not?
I see it’s on the BSFA Awards longlst2, which is only right and proper.
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And I say ‘English’ very specifically and deliberately. We don’t call them that in Scotland. And even the Wikipedia article I linked to says ‘England and Wales in the body, despite saying ‘United Kingdom’ in title and stub. I’d normally approve of that, but here it’s wrong. ↩︎
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That page is bad, as it’s not dated, so it’s likely to have next year’s longlist in a year’s time. Who’s running the website over at the BSFA these days? Not me. ↩︎