The Incandescent (Tesh)
May. 20th, 2025 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn4+/5. So in retrospect it may not have been the best idea, if I wanted to be unbiased about this book, to start reading The Incandescent the same day that my college advisor had a retirement celebration (that non-locals were able to attend via zoom, hurray for zoom). I certainly had no shortage of professors in college for whom I would have no particular incentive to attend their retirement celebration even through zoom, but this professor was special -- as evidenced by how all the people who spoke (and there were a fair few, it was 2 1/2 hours long) spoke of him -- many of them spoke about how brilliant he was and his brilliant research, which is of course a big part of who he is and was, but almost all of them treated this as adjunct to talking about how committed he was to helping as many people as he could, as much as he could. I remember him as taking great pains to make sure that as many undergrads in the department as possible had as friendly a time as possible, and as being a champion for women in physics before it was cool. (During my time there, there was a surge in physics majors in general and also a much larger percentage of women physics majors than other technical majors had, and while it was not solely because of him, it had a lot to do with his efforts and the example he set.) After my time, he was a House Master -- sorry, Faculty Dean -- which means he and his wife headed up one of the, let's call them dorms, and were responsible for the few hundred undergraduates (and some grad students) who resided there. There were several people who talked about his House work, including one of the staff members, which I thought was utterly fantastic. A couple of people talked about how every year he would get the list of rising sophomores who would enter into his House, about a hundred of them I expect, and he'd learn all their names pretty much overnight. Another former student talked about how he'd pulled strings when he found that the student had become homeless, so that he had a place to stay. There were stories after stories about how he'd helped and supported so many students.
Anyway -- so I was already primed to be feeling very emotional about teachers and students and how teachers stand in a pastoral role with respect to their students, and then I started this book. It takes place in a posh English boarding school, Chetwood School, that teaches magic alongside the more usual A-levels subjects, and where demons of various sizes are attracted to the magic of the adolescents.
...So, of course, if you've read the Scholomance books, this is sounding rather familiar, and yes, this book is clearly situated in a post-Scholomance world, with the boarding school's demons clearly based (superficially) on the Scholomance mals. But that being said, it's a very different book with a very different set of concerns, and the demons aren't like mals on the fundamental Scholomance-spoilery level, although there are sideways nods to that in the resolution of this book.
In the Scholomance, as well as in its own predecessor the Harry Potter books, teachers are an afterthought (HP) or not even present at all (Scholomance) in terms of the action, which is all driven by the students (as in, indeed, most boarding-school books). Furthermore, both sets of books are almost aggressively not interested in pedagogy as an element of a school, much less an important one. But here, Tesh has reversed all that. Teachers and teaching, what it means to teach, what it means to be part of a school as an adult: these are the main characters and themes. What does it mean to be a good teacher, and how does one go about it? What responsibility does one have to one's students, both pedagogically and otherwise?
In The Incandescent, Dr. Sapphire "Saff" Walden, 37 years old, teaches A-levels on the invocation of demons. The book is largely from Walden's point of view, and she drives the majority of the action of the book; she herself was a brilliant student at Chetwood twenty years before, with accompanying backstory, and passed up a lucrative job in US defense to instead teach. (We are told that demon invocation is good for only two types of jobs: academia and military. Ha ha Tesh yes I see what you're doing there, although I actually don't think it really makes sense in her world; surely someone in this AU has figured out how to monetize demons at this point...) Her A-level class is made up of four students: brilliant Nikki, with her own backstory; careful Aneeta; careless Will; and intuitive Mathias. Her teaching of this class, and what comes out of it, are central concerns of the book, though there are other central strands as well: how she interacts with various colleagues, like Ebele Nwosu, the pastoral deputy head (what at my high school we would have called the head of Residential Life), or Marshal Laura Kenning who is the head of the Marshals protecting them from demons, or another magician who comes to work at Chetwood, Mark Daubery.
Walden isn't like my advisor, who I think is just naturally really nice and really interested in people. Walden is a bit cold, quite introverted, often more than a bit arrogant. She has reasonable social skills (most of the time) and excellent teaching skills, but those are all learned rather than innate. In other words, I really enjoyed being in Walden's POV and identified with her a lot :P And still, and still, she loves and cares for the children entrusted to her, and works tirelessly -- well, no, that isn't quite right, she is tired a lot, but she works a huge amount anyway -- to make those children their best selves academically and in all the other ways she can.
The book is not meant to be overridingly plot-driven and/or character-arc-driven, as Some Desperate Glory is intensely driven by both; nor does it set out to makeover the universe, as SDG does. Incandescent does have an important plot and arc, and changes in the world, but more incrementally; I felt that this book has theme and rumination as a much greater component than in SDG. Which is very fitting in a book about academic learning, at that. It's a little slower-paced, a little more about the journey and a little less about hurtling off to the next thing (which both Kyr and SDG were rather more like).
It is interesting how different in very many ways this is from SDG, which I thought was great (I love when authors experiment). It's even very different stylistically, which makes a lot of sense.sprocket observed to me that SDG has almost no semicolons. (Maybe none?) The thing is, Kyr thinks in a very straightforward, blunt way. This type of POV is amenable to short, straightforward sentences. Walden is an academic, though as a teacher a more practical one than, say, a research-only academic; her sentences are longer and more leisurely, though not to the degree where you might sometimes call it flowery (as you might find, for example, in Possession, when Byatt is mimicking various kinds of academic-speech). It's really pretty great (and hamsterwoman, you know the counterexample I was thinking of :P ). But it does mean that I suspect a lot of people who loved SDG might actually not like this book, it's so different in some profound ways.
One of the themes that runs through the book is an acknowledgement of the problem of elite schools. On one hand, the students who get to go to the elite school can be helped enormously, including under-resourced students on scholarship who are now able to get access to resources and teaching that can literally change their lives. On the other hand, the whole milieu of the elite school (and thus also the boarding-school/elite-school book) is inherently classist and unfair; some kids, not all but mostly rich kids, get to experience all this, and other kids just don't, even though they would love it just as much or more, even though they need the help just as much or more. The book acknowledges this tension, and incremental progress is made, but it doesn't claim to solve it really at all. And I think that for a world that's much more grown-up than a YA novel, that makes sense; much as it would be nice to solve all the problems of inequity in a single book, these are hard problems.
I will say that I continue to think endings and explanations are not quite Tesh's forte (to figure out the motive in one particular place, I had to read the relevant section three times), but the book still very much worked for me anyway.
One minor spoilery thing: It seems like suddenly Chetwood School is like, hey, let's use some of our endowment to fund programs for deserving child magicians? I appreciate that Tesh tried to at least make a nod to the thread on school inequity... maybe I missed something but this seems like it came out of the blue and also seems like a weird thing for a school to do right after presumably a lot of parents were upset and pulling their kids out and so on and so they might have other needs for the endowment?? Did I miss a really large donation by someone?
Anyway...hidden_variable and K, I spent this entire book thinking, you should absolutely and positively read this book!! (And many of the rest of you should too -- crystalpyramid, I think this is also directly relevant to your interests -- though I also don't think everyone who liked SDG will like it.)
Anyway -- so I was already primed to be feeling very emotional about teachers and students and how teachers stand in a pastoral role with respect to their students, and then I started this book. It takes place in a posh English boarding school, Chetwood School, that teaches magic alongside the more usual A-levels subjects, and where demons of various sizes are attracted to the magic of the adolescents.
...So, of course, if you've read the Scholomance books, this is sounding rather familiar, and yes, this book is clearly situated in a post-Scholomance world, with the boarding school's demons clearly based (superficially) on the Scholomance mals. But that being said, it's a very different book with a very different set of concerns, and the demons aren't like mals on the fundamental Scholomance-spoilery level, although there are sideways nods to that in the resolution of this book.
In the Scholomance, as well as in its own predecessor the Harry Potter books, teachers are an afterthought (HP) or not even present at all (Scholomance) in terms of the action, which is all driven by the students (as in, indeed, most boarding-school books). Furthermore, both sets of books are almost aggressively not interested in pedagogy as an element of a school, much less an important one. But here, Tesh has reversed all that. Teachers and teaching, what it means to teach, what it means to be part of a school as an adult: these are the main characters and themes. What does it mean to be a good teacher, and how does one go about it? What responsibility does one have to one's students, both pedagogically and otherwise?
In The Incandescent, Dr. Sapphire "Saff" Walden, 37 years old, teaches A-levels on the invocation of demons. The book is largely from Walden's point of view, and she drives the majority of the action of the book; she herself was a brilliant student at Chetwood twenty years before, with accompanying backstory, and passed up a lucrative job in US defense to instead teach. (We are told that demon invocation is good for only two types of jobs: academia and military. Ha ha Tesh yes I see what you're doing there, although I actually don't think it really makes sense in her world; surely someone in this AU has figured out how to monetize demons at this point...) Her A-level class is made up of four students: brilliant Nikki, with her own backstory; careful Aneeta; careless Will; and intuitive Mathias. Her teaching of this class, and what comes out of it, are central concerns of the book, though there are other central strands as well: how she interacts with various colleagues, like Ebele Nwosu, the pastoral deputy head (what at my high school we would have called the head of Residential Life), or Marshal Laura Kenning who is the head of the Marshals protecting them from demons, or another magician who comes to work at Chetwood, Mark Daubery.
Walden isn't like my advisor, who I think is just naturally really nice and really interested in people. Walden is a bit cold, quite introverted, often more than a bit arrogant. She has reasonable social skills (most of the time) and excellent teaching skills, but those are all learned rather than innate. In other words, I really enjoyed being in Walden's POV and identified with her a lot :P And still, and still, she loves and cares for the children entrusted to her, and works tirelessly -- well, no, that isn't quite right, she is tired a lot, but she works a huge amount anyway -- to make those children their best selves academically and in all the other ways she can.
The book is not meant to be overridingly plot-driven and/or character-arc-driven, as Some Desperate Glory is intensely driven by both; nor does it set out to makeover the universe, as SDG does. Incandescent does have an important plot and arc, and changes in the world, but more incrementally; I felt that this book has theme and rumination as a much greater component than in SDG. Which is very fitting in a book about academic learning, at that. It's a little slower-paced, a little more about the journey and a little less about hurtling off to the next thing (which both Kyr and SDG were rather more like).
It is interesting how different in very many ways this is from SDG, which I thought was great (I love when authors experiment). It's even very different stylistically, which makes a lot of sense.
sprocket observed to me that SDG has almost no semicolons. (Maybe none?) The thing is, Kyr thinks in a very straightforward, blunt way. This type of POV is amenable to short, straightforward sentences. Walden is an academic, though as a teacher a more practical one than, say, a research-only academic; her sentences are longer and more leisurely, though not to the degree where you might sometimes call it flowery (as you might find, for example, in Possession, when Byatt is mimicking various kinds of academic-speech). It's really pretty great (and hamsterwoman, you know the counterexample I was thinking of :P ). But it does mean that I suspect a lot of people who loved SDG might actually not like this book, it's so different in some profound ways.One of the themes that runs through the book is an acknowledgement of the problem of elite schools. On one hand, the students who get to go to the elite school can be helped enormously, including under-resourced students on scholarship who are now able to get access to resources and teaching that can literally change their lives. On the other hand, the whole milieu of the elite school (and thus also the boarding-school/elite-school book) is inherently classist and unfair; some kids, not all but mostly rich kids, get to experience all this, and other kids just don't, even though they would love it just as much or more, even though they need the help just as much or more. The book acknowledges this tension, and incremental progress is made, but it doesn't claim to solve it really at all. And I think that for a world that's much more grown-up than a YA novel, that makes sense; much as it would be nice to solve all the problems of inequity in a single book, these are hard problems.
I will say that I continue to think endings and explanations are not quite Tesh's forte (to figure out the motive in one particular place, I had to read the relevant section three times), but the book still very much worked for me anyway.
One minor spoilery thing: It seems like suddenly Chetwood School is like, hey, let's use some of our endowment to fund programs for deserving child magicians? I appreciate that Tesh tried to at least make a nod to the thread on school inequity... maybe I missed something but this seems like it came out of the blue and also seems like a weird thing for a school to do right after presumably a lot of parents were upset and pulling their kids out and so on and so they might have other needs for the endowment?? Did I miss a really large donation by someone?
Anyway...
hidden_variable and K, I spent this entire book thinking, you should absolutely and positively read this book!! (And many of the rest of you should too -- crystalpyramid, I think this is also directly relevant to your interests -- though I also don't think everyone who liked SDG will like it.)
no subject
Date: 2025-05-21 04:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-21 04:21 pm (UTC)Incandescent really is a thoughtfully built book! And something I didn't realize I really wanted until I was reading it.
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Date: 2025-05-21 04:35 am (UTC)LOL, I do! :D
A friend (who really liked SDG and Silver in the Wood) read this book and has some sort of spoilery gripe with it, which so far I've decided not to be spoiled for, so I don't know what it is, but it made me interested to read the book, and your write-up even more so :)
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Date: 2025-05-21 04:23 pm (UTC)Ohhhh I don't suppose this friend is on DW? :) I can think of various spoilery gripes one might have (as I mentioned in the review, I did sort of feel like the ending and the explanations could have used a bit more, much like SDG, but I liked it so much (and am sort of resigned to this with Tesh) that I wasn't too put out by that)... anyway, I will be interested to see what you think, and what the gripes are! :)
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Date: 2025-05-21 04:31 pm (UTC)Only very intermittently on DW these days, but she did post a Goodreads review here :)
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Date: 2025-05-21 04:43 pm (UTC)YEP, at least one of your friend's gripes is very similar to mine! (And your friend has another one that is absolutely a sensible critique but that didn't bother me as much while reading.) I'll be really interested to see what you think, and we can talk more about it then :)
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Date: 2025-05-21 04:53 pm (UTC)So far, if I count the Greenhollow duology as one thing, everything I've read by SDG I loved part of and was frustrated by some inexplicable-to-me choice later in the book, so I expect I will a) enjoy it a lot and b) have some gripes with it, but I'm curious to see if they will be the same gripes :P
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Date: 2025-05-22 02:46 pm (UTC)(K)
Date: 2025-05-21 05:52 am (UTC)I really loved everything up to the point where Saffy makes the horrible mistake not to call Ramamurthy or Laura and ask for help. Right at that point I put the book down for 48ish hours and then came back tonight once I had accepted that it was all going to be excruciating. (See previous comment about Act 3; this is a bit like that.) I agree, Tesh could be better at endings.
But all the rest of it was so so much like my privileged private school, plus all the lovely absurdities of college house life. And the copier! I felt seen to the point of nakedness. (I know you need to copy 20 problem sets in the next 5 minutes before class starts. But I need staples. and toner. and more paper. and a paper jam fixed. and my hole punch tray emptied. and blood. finally you're running to the copier on a different floor.)
Wikipedia says Tesh is a classics teacher. I do wonder if she's still teaching -- and how much Saffy is like her, and how much she's created from other teachers Tesh is observing. If I were Tesh's department head or division head, I'd be feeling doubly self-conscious right now :)
Re: (K)
Date: 2025-05-21 04:30 pm (UTC)I really loved everything up to the point where Saffy makes the horrible mistake not to call Ramamurthy or Laura and ask for help
Ohhhh yes definitely me too. I have the opposite coping mechanism: I actually flipped through the pages up until where the terms go by because it was so clear that it was going to be terrible and I just wanted to get through it. I did later have to go back and reread it so I could figure out exactly what happened, but from the safe distance of having finished the book so that I knew everything turned out OK. :) Yes, it's an Act 3 kind of thing, isn't it! (I haven't read any books on general novel plotting, but I could imagine that something like this shows up.)
I assumed that Saffy is some her (some of the ways she talks about teaching sound like they really came from the inside of her head) and some others. Heeeee I also didn't even think of how this must read to Tesh's department head (!)
Re: (K)
Date: 2025-05-22 04:16 pm (UTC)Hrmm. When you put it that way, it feels my ADHD problematic avoidance behavior -- not so different from putting off the homework I'm most worried about :(
Copiers are SUCH a thing! I'm not sure I've ever actually failed to get my copies done, but I have definitely given up on multiple copiers in a row in the course of finding one that will work. And I've been five minutes late to class a couple times (over ten years) because I was dealing with copier disasters. A common 8:20am (school starts at 8:55) discussion in our pod (math teacher desk group) is pooling information about which copier has which problem. I am considering taping demon eyes to the library copier. I've never actually had to teach on one of the days when the power went out and the copiers Really didn't work.
Re: (K)
Date: 2025-05-31 04:47 am (UTC)omg copiers!!
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Date: 2025-05-21 10:20 am (UTC)A while back, a comment - somewhere, somewhen - about a book involving magical academia made an impression. 3-4 months ago, I picked up a different book that I thought was that one... and I really, really enjoyed Blood Over Bright Haven, but it puzzled me that I remembered a comment about sapphic romantic arcs, because Blood Over Bright Haven does not have any f/f romantic or sexual interactions.
I now think the earlier comment related to The Incandescence.
Anyway I'm 40% in and having a great time. Thanks!
(You might also enjoy Blood Over Bright Haven, which involves an embattled young magician in a solidly-drawn higher academia magical setting.)
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Date: 2025-05-21 04:34 pm (UTC)You know, my sister recommended Blood over Bright Haven to me recently -- I will jump it up in the queue! :D
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Date: 2025-05-22 01:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-22 02:48 pm (UTC)And yes, what happened to Mark?? I also wanted to know! (And why didn't he get killed?)
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Date: 2025-05-22 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-31 04:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-23 02:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-27 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-29 12:25 pm (UTC)I agree that the ending is the weakest bit! A (who is a professor) also read the book and had more issues with the ending than I did (which I don't know I can fully explain but he decided that it was best to think of the whole ending section as an epilogue).
And yeah, the Mark bit felt unresolved and underexplained! Why didn't his contacts in the larger wourld notice he was missing and do something?
"to figure out the motive in one particular place, I had to read the relevant section three times" -- curious which section this is!
Reading this book made me realize that I don't believe in schools in quite the way that the narrator or story does. This is partly a matter of growing up mostly homeschooled in a fairly self-directed way, and my teaching experience being college-level or at summer programs for gifted kids that allowed a lot of flexibility, and I can't really imagine I'd be good teaching at a boarding school like Saffy's.
(K)
Date: 2025-05-29 08:30 pm (UTC)Re: (K)
Date: 2025-05-31 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-31 05:07 am (UTC)I laughed helplessly at that, because... yeah.
A (who is a professor) also read the book and had more issues with the ending than I did (which I don't know I can fully explain but he decided that it was best to think of the whole ending section as an epilogue).
Oh, interesting! I mostly just sort of thought that there were large parts of the ending, like the endowment, that didn't really quite make sense and/or that weren't really resolved and followed up on, like Mark, but it sounds like A. had other problems?
"to figure out the motive in one particular place, I had to read the relevant section three times" -- curious which section this is!
This was Mark's motive for doing the stuff he was doing at Chetwood! It sounds like he was trying to map out what the Phoenix was capable of for his military bosses, but it's the kind of thing where if one pokes at it a bit it doesn't really actually make that much sense to me (which maybe is why she didn't flesh it out more?) -- like, it seems like an absurdly Rube-Goldberg mechanism to make such a map by setting little demon traps and seeing what happened. Did he even have any reason to believe Walden would be dispatching all the little traps?
Also, to be fair, as I mentioned to K above, the first time I read this section I more skimmed it because I was trying to get past the part where Bad Things Happened, so maybe I should really only say I had to read it twice. But even on that first reread I was still confused as to Mark's motivations.
Reading this book made me realize that I don't believe in schools in quite the way that the narrator or story does.
Ah -- for the last two years of high school I was at a (public) magnet boarding school. While there are a lot of things my school didn't have in common with Chetwood School (especially being, well, public), it does mean that I had a very strong base to believe in schools the way that Walden and the narrative do. And I guess my kid now being in high school -- though of course it is even more different from Chetwood, not being a boarding school -- has also kind of made that thread stronger in my brain.
If you don't mind my asking, how did you find the social aspect of homeschooling? (I'm asking because there is a nontrivial chance that my younger kid might end up being hybrid-homeschooled either next year or the year after, and the social aspect worries me because I'm not a naturally social person myself ,and though I try to provide social opportunities, I'm not sure I do it all that well.)
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Date: 2025-05-31 12:36 pm (UTC)Yeah, the whole Mark thing was confusing enough that I was left with some lingering doubts of "maybe our unreliable narrator is being paranoid and Mark is not actually up to any government skullduggery", which I'm not sure was intended.
Will answer your other question in a different comment!
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Date: 2025-06-07 02:32 am (UTC)how the narration described the protagonist as being so old when she's younger than us!
Haha, seriously! If Walden is an ancient crone, I've got one foot in the grave. (In fairness, though, I have genuinely been having these sorts of "omg I'm so old" thoughts regularly ever since I started teaching, when I was 28, so I can't say it's an inaccurate portrayal in that sense.)
I had some of those same issues about the ending as well. I definitely agree with wishing the kids could have been more heroic, and I found it terribly sad that Walden has to give up her entire career as she knows is (probably because I identify with her a little too much). I did overall like the book a lot, though! I will definitely be writing something up about it, although it might take me a while.
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Date: 2025-06-07 12:29 pm (UTC)Yes, I definitely read Walden's self-description of being old as affected by having spent so much time around teenagers, along with burnout (I (and A) are only slightly older than Walden).
I did appreciate that the book makes it clear that the kids are in some ways smarter than Walden, but that doesn't mean they should be in charge. (I also suspect they come off as smarter because they are bouncing ideas off each other, while Walden is a loner.)
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Date: 2025-06-08 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-08 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-08 09:34 pm (UTC)The geas-y stuff not being cool enough, yes, I can see that. I was expecting the whole time that somehow Laura would just know, instead of having to be told, and I did kind of feel like the nature of a geas wasn't really established until trying to explain it after the fact. The ending: I didn't mind the career reset, but I did, yeah, feel that the whole how-do-demons-interplay-with-this-world thing wasn't quite nailed down in a way that could lead to unfortunate implications, like the Wardens being right about the world.
Ahahaha, I was convinced, until the book explicitly stated otherwise, that Walden was ten years older than she was -- that is, my age!
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Date: 2025-06-02 03:38 am (UTC)Homeschooling was definitely better for me socially than K-3 in public school, but that is not saying so much! As an introvert I didn't find myself too deprived of a social life; I had various social opportunities, through a homeschooling group that did various stuff, where I made a couple friends, and also I had a good friend who I saw in the summer when we played at the same playground. In general my mom was the sort of person who was willing to do lots of volunteer organizing if it would provide social opportunities for me and my sister: early on she was doing volunteer math enrichment in local public schools and would bring me along; this later turned into Mathcounts coaching, and she also helped organize the summer Shakespeare plays through our homeschool group (but open to non-homeschoolers), and started the local math circle/math team when I was in high school.
From about age 12 onwards my social life moved partially online, both with friends I made through the National Spelling Bee and from math competitions (this was before AoPS but the MathCounts message boards served as similar function) and other internet communities more focused on writing or book fandom. Also at about that age we joined the local UU church and I got involved in its youth group. This became more important as a social outlet as I entered high school and many of the homeschoolers my age or older decided to go to public high school or early college/community college. Related to that, I hit a rough patch in 9th grade, not helped by the bit where I had just had an amazing experience at MOP and nothing else could compare, but things improved steadily.
(For comparison: my younger sister is the extrovert of the family, which as a kid would drive me off the wall when I just wanted to be left alone. The local public school didn't really work for her either, and she also decided to homeschool after 3rd grade; she did have a good friend who lived in the neighborhood, which helped, and also had a rough patch around age 14, but things improved after she joined a community theater organization that put on plays in schools, and then started taking community college classes.)
When I read A Deadly Education I recognized a lot of my younger self in El, specifically the belief that I was doomed to be a misfit, to the point where it was getting in the way of my enjoyment because I wanted El to just grow up already. (See also my reply to
(I also think that homeschooling works better if one can do it for more than a year at a time to give ime to figure out how to make it work for you, but I realize that also sometimes circumstances happen)
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Date: 2025-06-08 09:36 pm (UTC)A. is very much an introvert, which bothers me a bit as I can see a lot of places where his social skills are a little off because he just doesn't talk to people enough, even as it is. I suppose the odds are he will be just fine and I am being an over-worried parent :) A. does also have a church youth group as a social group, in theory, though he hasn't really jelled with the group at this point -- though to be fair they do a lot more stuff together starting in a couple of years.
Your mom sounds awesome! I don't think I'm nearly as awesome as your mom, though I guess I do a couple of similar things -- I did organize our school's math team for both the local competition and (when E was doing it) the Mathcounts competition -- but to be honest it was more "I think my kid(s) would enjoy doing this" and less trying to make social opportunities for them ;)
I'm glad you had the online outlet as well. (Ha - I'm just enough older than you that at that age we had letter-writing, which was quite a bit less efficient!) A. does have two online friends he does Minecraft with, although even there I have to keep prodding him to actually talk to them and not wander away and work on his own Minecraft creation by himself!
Thanks again <3
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Date: 2025-06-10 12:25 pm (UTC)My mom is pretty awesome, and I'm not as awesome as her either! When I told people that I was homeschooled I would get a lot of "your mom must be very special", which I mentally rolled my eyes at because (a) I was a teenager, lol, but also (b) I was a very self-directed learner and didn't think of myself as being taught by my parents (I preferred, and to some extent still do, to describe myself as a "homeschooler" rather than "homeschooled") (c) my mom is very good at convincing other people that yes, they can homeschool their kids, even if they don't have the impressive CV that she had before learning academia to become a stay-at-home parent. But actually my mom is special, it's just that as a teenager I didn't see the ways in which being a homeschool parent is hard (and I feel like a lot of pro-homeschooling dudes on the internet don't either) -- not all of which came easily to her either, but she did her best. I think that being part of a homeschooling newsgroup, and the online friends she made there, was very helpful for her -- I think homeschool group drama is like small private school drama only worse because all the adults involved are parents (ETA: and because homeschooling parents are more likely to be strongly opinionated and uncompromising), and it's useful to have other homeschooling parent friends to bond with who aren't directly involved in that drama.
(I'm old enough that I did have penpals, even after I got an e-mail account, but the internet was just a lot more efficient!)
no subject
Date: 2025-06-12 04:53 pm (UTC)Haha, yeah, I appreciate my own mom a lot more now that I'm no longer a teenager! I wasn't homeschooled, but my mom was a stay-at-home mom who did spend a lot of time and energy on figuring out how to make the most of the resources that she/we had available, both academic and social. (I like to talk about how, in high school, when we saw kids my age while out and about, they'd say hi to my mom enthusiastically before they'd say hi to me as an afterthought -- it's a bit of a joke, but not really.)
(and I feel like a lot of pro-homeschooling dudes on the internet don't either)
Haha, quoted for truth! (D and I talked about our kids being homeschoolers and ultimately decided to put them in school, but before we came to this conclusion we had some talks about it which made clear that he had never really thought about what would ideally go into it. And actually there are things I never really thought about at the time either, like follow-through -- I'm pretty confident in my academic ability to teach my kids stuff on a day-to-day basis, but following through to make sure that they learn consistently and not just once a month or so is something I'd have to really work at, though now that they have all these curricula and the charter homeschool framework and so on, I think that part has been made easier.)
Oh gosh, it didn't even occur to me that homeschool group drama would be like small private school drama, though that makes A LOT of sense! (The teachers are driving some of our current drama, but it's the parents who are really fanning it into flames, in my opinion.) Hm.
(And I'm young enough that by the end of college I had moved to more email than paper letters, though I sometimes still did some of the latter!)
(K)
Date: 2025-05-31 05:41 pm (UTC)Re: (K)
Date: 2025-06-08 09:36 pm (UTC)I did really love (though I see other people did not, so much) the section with the kids and how they were the only ones who could see that Saff wasn't what she seemed. I just felt like that was a very realistically heroic thing for them to do!
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Date: 2025-06-02 06:32 am (UTC)I appreciate that Tesh tried to at least make a nod to the thread on school inequity... maybe I missed something but this seems like it came out of the blue and also seems like a weird thing for a school to do right after presumably a lot of parents were upset and pulling their kids out and so on and so they might have other needs for the endowment?? Did I miss a really large donation by someone?
You didn't miss anything! Maybe someone went back to Roz. Or... it sounded like the Wardens were involved in some of the sudden interest in state-sponsored magic training, so they may have pulled money from their budget. Or, speaking of government, Mark or the shadowy institution he may or may not be affiliated with may have thrown some money at Chetwood. A little placation, or perhaps a quiet legal settlement, for using the school as their Phoenix test site. You didn't miss anything, Tesh just wrapped up in a hurry, or didn't have the right PoV character to show the wrap-up.
Speaking of Mark, Tesh signposted that he was terrible far better than she convinced me any sane adult would find a clock if Mark told you the time. The real conflicts are Saffie and the Phoenix, or Saffie and demons in general, or Saffie and Laura, or Saffie vs Saffie. (The Phoenix inhabiting / reshaping Saffie into someone 100% subsumed into the role Saffie had created for herself was both horrifying and kind of funny.)
If themes are driving Incandescent, then characters are second, as part of expressing the themes. Plot would come in third. Which might be why Mark doesn't convince me; his role in the themes (hereditary access to elite schooling / power structures, unearned and unchecked privilege, deceptive social presentation) can be carried by other characters. Arguably he could be a mirror or foil for Saffie, who does her fair share of deceptive coloring, and is so convinced of her place in the world. If that was what Tesh was driving for, she needed to pull it out a bit more in the actual writing. What's unique about Mark, from what I remember, is that he is structurally the only adult on school grounds who could kick off the act three issue that Laura Kenning has to be summoned to fix.
The Act Three Issue hit as I was making my first (Saturday evening) attempt at packing, and I decided that final packing and the signposted looming disaster could wait until morning.
Speaking of, Laura gets this novel's spirit quest for your rubbish ex, except Saffie isn't even her ex! They went on one date! Saffie nailed it when she said she got a doctorate instead of therapy! She should do something about that.
The exclamation points indicate excitement as well as frustration. (Saffie! You cannot logic yourself out of an emotional response! I have no idea why that concept would be at my fingertips! Cough cough cough...) I enjoyed Incandescent and will probably reread it sooner rather than later. First I've got Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay to finish before the audiobook loan expires. I bring this up because I am seven chapters in and the protagonist thinks he is a.) funny b.) clever c.) can be an unreliable narrator while also declaiming his unreliable narrator status to the reader. Are he and Mark kindred souls? If the recently introduced alien biology were any less fascinating, I'd DNF and we'd never know. However, the alien biology is an interesting concept, and for that I will tolerate the narrator. For now.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-08 09:36 pm (UTC)Or... it sounded like the Wardens were involved in some of the sudden interest in state-sponsored magic training, so they may have pulled money from their budget. Or, speaking of government, Mark or the shadowy institution he may or may not be affiliated with may have thrown some money at Chetwood. A little placation, or perhaps a quiet legal settlement, for using the school as their Phoenix test site.
Ooooh. I like the idea that the Mark/shadowy-institution may have been acting on the side of good here. That would have been a nice thread to wrap up.
Tesh signposted that he was terrible far better than she convinced me any sane adult would find a clock if Mark told you the time.
Hee! Yeah, I didn't really think about it at the time, but you're really right that he's a plot catalyst but not an interesting character in and of himself.
Saffie! You cannot logic yourself out of an emotional response!
Uh. Feeling seen, here :P :)
First I've got Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay to finish before the audiobook loan expires. I bring this up because I am seven chapters in and the protagonist thinks he is a.) funny b.) clever c.) can be an unreliable narrator while also declaiming his unreliable narrator status to the reader. Are he and Mark kindred souls? If the recently introduced alien biology were any less fascinating, I'd DNF and we'd never know. However, the alien biology is an interesting concept, and for that I will tolerate the narrator. For now.
I've got this via Hugo reading and am only in chapter 1, and I am finding it pretty hard to get through! Maybe I will go to Chapter 7 and then see if the alien biology will snag me (though I think it is less of a draw for me than you).
no subject
Date: 2025-07-24 11:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-30 08:03 pm (UTC)It's interesting how I feel this book resonates with not just people whose passion is pedagogy, but people like you -- and me, in a very different way -- who are at least tangential to that world (well, I suppose I'm more tangential than you are, not really formally teaching at all, but doing a couple of teaching-like things).
Hmm, interesting about the romantic partner idea. I feel like my parents are enough like this that at some point I started placing a very high priority on romantic partners who were deeply non-threatening (as I have a bad habit, as a result of my upbringing, of trying to placate -- my spouse is in fact deeply non-threatening and every once in a while my placate mode kicks in anyway, which always rather confuses him).
BTW, not really relevant to this book, but I've been thinking about you and that amazing story you wrote for
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 01:25 am (UTC)I try to be the non-threatening one, although I feel like I've been snappish during the past year. But if relationships are usually pairings between a cheetah and a golden retriever, I try to be the retriever when I can.
I read a mystery by Jane Pek (The Verifiers) last year which I recced on discord with the comment that what would have been an SF-lite book ten years ago was just a normal novel nowadays. It's crazy how fast things have gone!
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 06:42 pm (UTC)