SCHOOL FOR PSYCHICS – K. C. Archer | Looking For a Good Book

Teddy Cannon is a smart, intuitive young woman. So much so that she’s been banned from many of the casinos in Las Vegas. Yet the rigors of getting an education and earning an ‘honest’ living never really sit well with Teddy. She’s always been good at reading other people at the poker tables and that’s where she’s most comfortable. When she is discovered in a casino and about to be forcibly run out, a stranger intervenes. A stranger who is looking to recruit Teddy. Teddy, it seems, is not just good at reading people … she’s actually psychic. The stranger runs a school for people like Teddy, training them to develop their skills and work for a branch of law enforcement set out to help people in a way that only someone like she can.

School has never been her ‘thing’ and she knows it will be a challenge, but the fact that there are others with special abilities, is encouraging and Teddy decides to give it a try. But there are secrets at the school that Teddy begins to uncover that will continue to change the way she sees those who are supposed to be her friends.

I really had a lot of fun with this book right at the start. Author K. C. Archer gives us a slightly stereotypical YA female protagonist, but Teddy isn’t a mooning little girl who develops passionate crushes on the cute guy in the book … well, that’s not entirely true. She does do precisely this. The difference here is that this isn’t the heart of the story. This is a little side action which sometimes feels included just to have all the bases covered for the YA audience.

Te introduction of Teddy and her introduction to this school for psychics is really well done. It is engaging and exciting and we get a good feel for the struggles that Teddy faces as she learns about her abilities. The friends, students, and instructors we meet along the way are nicely fleshed out and this takes on a very nice tone such that it feels quite believable.

But then we get into a new plotline.

Teddy learns some things that muddy her views on the school and those around her. This new storyline is clearly devised to build a larger story arc that will encompass multiple books. But somehow this new development is not nearly as interesting as what we were getting in the early stages. And while it becomes a definite YA novel with a group of students taking on the adults in their world, which is a fairly common trope in YA, it also becomes less believable. It was definitely a head-smacking moment when the students managed a crime against, and inside the building of, the FBI.

There’s a lot of fun here, and I am intrigued, but at the end of the book, I wasn’t as satisfied as I was during the early chapters. How the stories play out in future books will decide the fate of this series, since the characters and the premise are definitely interesting.

Looking for a good book? School for Psychics by K. C. Archer is an adventurous YA fantasy that has a lot going for it, but falls just short on delivering a strong story.