And yes – true to form, it was the cover that sold this one. I loved that gold on black effect, which worked really well. And after reading Kristen’s review on her blog, Metaphor and Moonlight, I went ahead and requested it…
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.
This is part of the rather chatty blurb, but gives you a good idea of Teddy at the start of the story. She is definitely rather scattered, but what you don’t immediately appreciate at the beginning of the book, is the fear underlying her bolshie attitude. She could immediately sense when anyone was lying, right from when she was a small child – and that terrified her. I liked the flaws and her apparent flakiness, which we discover has a solid cause. As a result, the book does take some time before the story gathers momentum and really hits its stride.
While the story is told from first person viewpoint via Teddy’s character, we also get to know a number of the other students, though because she has a tendency to hold them at arm’s length, we don’t perhaps know them quite as well as we would like. But it also means that when the twists come, it is a surprise.
Himself, being the paranoid sort, immediately worried about who would be monitoring such a potentially powerful tool as an establishment where people with psychic powers can be trained and moulded into law enforcement officers. I was pleased to see this aspect is addressed as the book progresses and this bodes well for the second book in the series, which should give us more of the political landscape and open up the whole issue of psychic warfare as a wider subject.
This is an enjoyable start to a series that promises to continue gaining traction as it progresses and I look forward to the next book. Recommended for fans of mental powers and school-based stories. While I obtained an arc of School for Psychics from Netgalley, the opinions I have expressed are unbiased and my own.
8/10
Brainfluff 