All grown up and still waiting on your letter from Hogwarts? Here are some book recommendations about magic schools to transport your grown-up self to a magical world during back-to-school season! These books are suitable for adults, not young readers, so please check for any content warnings before picking them up- you’ll find these schools aren’t quite like the Hogwarts you remember.
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
If Harry Potter were written from a professor’s perspective, you’d get Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent. This book is an ode to the hard work and sacrifice of teachers everywhere, magic and non-magic.
Powerful, competent Dr. Walden is the Director of Magic at Chetwood school. One of the most powerful magicians in England, her time is mostly spent in meetings and teaching A-Level Invocation to four talented, chaotic sixth-years, who test her in the same way any teenagers test their favorite teacher. Between the gaps of her busy schedule, it’s Walden’s responsibility to ensure Chetwood’s school boundaries, students, and centuries-old legacy are safe from demonic incursions.
The Incandescent asks the question: what happens when the being you need to defend your world against is yourself?
Magic For Liars by Sarah Gailey
Magic For Liars puts a noir spin on the non-magical sibling who never got to join her sister at Hogwarts.
Utterly unmagical and all grown up, Ivy Gamble is a private investigator and uniquely situated to investigate a murder at The Osthorne Academy of Young Mages. In a world where magic is secret, Ivy knows about the Osthorne Academy because her twin sister works there as a teacher of Theoretical Magic, and Ivy was never invited.
When a member of the faculty is murdered, Ivy is hired to investigate and reluctantly pulled into the world of magic into which she was never welcomed herself. As Ivy begins to lose herself in the case and the magical life she never had, the answer to the mysteries at Osthorne Academy get even murkier.
Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Jane Charles Anders
Instead of a traditional magic academy like Hogwarts, Anders explores a more home-schooled magic education in Lessons In Magic and Disaster, where the mother becomes the student in this role-reversal fantasy.
Jamie is a graduate student, a literature nerd, and secretly a witch. Weighed down by grief for her late wife, Jamie’s mother isolates herself for years in a one-room schoolhouse when Jamie takes it on herself to teach her mother the spells she’s been learning from a three-hundred-year old magical book. But Jamie doesn’t know the full story of her mother’s pain, and as they embark together on the study of magic, things only get more complicated for mother and daughter.
The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones by Lex Croucher
In The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones, Croucher explores what would happen if, unlike Hogwarts, a secret magic academy didn’t have the best of humanity in mind. The students are from the richest and most powerful families in England, and they are bound to secrecy to protect their own wealth and power, creating a dangerous dynamic of control.
Briar Jones, unmagical, accepts a Custodial job at the Temple School of Thaumaturgy, where her childhood best friend was accepted before disappearing from Briar’s life entirely. Briar is determined to infiltrate Temple and its cliques to uncover the world of magic and secrets that her childhood best friend disappeared behind. As Jones learns about the secretive magic system at Temple, in which those with access to power and knowledge exert control over those without, it becomes clear why nobody ever betrays the power locked behind Temple’s doors, and why nobody unmagical ever leaves.
Babel by R.F. Kuang
While Oxford is certainly a real, historic, non-magical university, Kuang invents the magical college nestled within it here, the Royal Institute of Translation– also known as Babel. At Babel, academics pursue both knowledge and power in a historical fantasy in which silver, magic, and translation interact to reveal the meaning lost in translation.
Born in China and orphaned at a young age, Robin is raised in Britain by the mysterious professor Lovell, training his entire life for the academic rigor of Babel. As Robin navigates the complications of being both Chinese-born and raised in Britain, trifling with the magical powers that betray his motherland and native tongue, he finds himself caught between Babel and a shadowy organization that stands up against imperial expansion. Robin is torn between his past, his present, and his contradicting loyalties in this story about power, violence, and colonialism.
The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw
The Hellebore Technical Institute makes Hogwarts look like a daycare. The students at Hellebore are the worst of the worst. Powerful and conscienceless, Hellebore admits the harbingers and villains you didn’t know existed. They’re also destined to be feasted upon by their professors at graduation.
Alessa Li, kidnapped and forcibly enrolled at the school, narrowly escapes the carnage on graduation. Trapped in the school’s library with her dangerously powerful classmates, the students must offer a human sacrifice each night, or the faculty will break in and kill everyone. The stakes are high, the violence is excessive, and the dangers are predatory. There’s violence on every page of this harrowing take on the magic school trope in a way that’s sure to keep you up at night.
