School for Psychics (School for Psychics, #1)
Teddy Cannon isn’t your typical twenty-something woman. She’s resourceful. She’s bright. She’s scrappy. She can also read people with uncanny precision. What she doesn’t realize: she’s actually psychic.
When a series of bad decisions leads Teddy to a run-in with the police, a mysterious stranger intervenes. He invites her to apply to the School for Psychics, a facility hidden off the coast of San Francisco where students are trained like Delta Force operatives: it’s competitive, cutthroat, and highly secretive. They’ll learn telepathy, telekinesis, investigative skills, and SWAT tactics. And if students survive their training, they go on to serve at the highest levels of government, using their skills to protect America, and the world.
In class, Teddy befriends Lucas, a rebel without a cause who can start and manipulate fire; Jillian, a hipster who can mediate communication between animals and humans; and Molly, a hacker who can apprehend the emotional state of another individual. But just as Teddy feels like she’s found where she might belong, strange things begin to happen: break-ins, missing students, and more. It leads Teddy to accept a dangerous mission that will ultimately cause her to question everything—her teachers, her friends, her family, and even herself.
Author: K.C. Archer
Rating: 3.25/5
Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for making this title available as a digital advanced reading copy.
School for Psychics is your typical story featuring a girl who has lived her life as a misfit, was adopted when she was young because her parents "died in a car crash," doesn't realize she has superpowers, gets to school to discover she has SUPER superpowers (hmmm...about those parents?), bands with a group of other misfits to solve a giant mystery...you know the type. That being said, as far as those stories go, this one was pretty good. So if those are your usual jam, you'll probably enjoy School for Psychics.
In the story, Teddy has lived her whole life believing she was epileptic, doomed to be a screw-up forever, and cursed with an uncomfortable (even disruptive) ability to tell when someone was lying. She's channeled that ability into poker and gotten herself into some serious trouble. A man shows up, demonstrates his psychic abilities, and tells her that she's psychic, too. He convinces her to come to school, the Whitfield Institute, and give herself a second chance.
The rest of the book is devoted to Teddy's first year at Whitfield. She struggles in her classes, with her new friends (which she has never really had before), and with her super-rare, super-impressive, super-hard-to-control powers in astral telepathy. She's also headstrong, impulsive, and extremely curious, especially when it comes to her parents—which leads her down a path that quickly careens out of control.
The premise of the book is intriguing, even if the execution was occasionally a little bit off. There were a lot of major plot points that were almost frustratingly clear to the reader, but Liz didn't see any of them until the end. I think this is because the author wrote certain scenes just to drop hints rather than working the hints into aspects of the broader plot. In real life, the pivotal moments would have been easy to miss, but when a whole chapter occurs just so that moment can happen, the reader catches on pretty quickly.
The end moved pretty quickly, though. I do want to know what will happen next and how it will all resolve. If all of the books in this series were already published, I'd probably pick up the next one right away.