September 08, 2025

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I have enjoyed Jeff Wheeler's work for some time, but the number of titles he has published was rather daunting. At my age, I don't think I can catch up with his rate of production.

But The Invisible College came to my attention when Amazon.com sent me an email promoting the upcoming third book in the series. The covers of the books were intriguing and showed real concern with the design -- a marker of quality, or at least of the faith the publisher had in the work.

So I bought The Invisible College for both Kindle and Audible, and after a month, when I finished the Great Courses lectures on the Etruscans, Audible pulled up The Invisible College and I was very quickly hooked.

I've been telling my writing students for decades that when you create a magic system, your hero is probably going to be the person who is most damaged by the magic system, without being killed (since, with rare exceptions, dead characters don't make good protagonists). Wheeler was never my student, but it seems that what's true is true, whether you hear it from me or not.

In a world where magic requires a combination of words and music to cast spells, the fact that McKenna Foster lost her hearing as a young child shuts her out of the world of magic entirely. She grew up deftly learning to read lips -- that is, lips, tongue, teeth, facial expressions, and other clues -- so that as long as she can see you clearly, she can understand every word you say, or at least guess at the meaning of the few she doesn't recognize.

By extensive reading, her command of language is extraordinary, and she delights in language without hearing any of it. She has taught herself a second language, Tannhauser (analogous to German in our world), and can read other people's speech in that language as well.

But, even though she can vocalize speech very well, so that others can hear and understand her easily, her parents arrange for her to take lessons from Robinson Hawksley, a brilliant young professor of elocution, in order to help her speak without errors of inflection and intonation that give away her deafness.

Hawksley recently survived the disease that killed his brothers, but it has left him weak and frail. He is an extraordinarily good musician, using piano, violin, or voice, which makes his sorcery very powerful using music alone, without words.

He is also a dedicated alchemist, working on magical projects that might help in the war effort against the Aesir, a superior species of near-immortal magic-users. But alchemy is expensive, leaving him with little to live on.

He is also scrupulous about living within his means -- to the point that he skips so many meals that he remains emaciated, never really recovering the look of health.

The result is that although he is only 26 years old, he looks like a man of at least 40, much older than his new student McKenna. Naturally, he falls in love with her; naturally, neither she nor her family regard him as any kind of romantic partner for her. So far, we're in Jane Austen country -- or perhaps the realm of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion or Candida.

Robinson's teaching methods -- acquired from his famous father -- make immediate improvements in McKenna's speech, leading her to hope that with more training she might learn to speak well enough to make use of magic -- which everyone knows a deaf person cannot possibly learn.

But this is a fantasy novel, not a straightforward romance, so the affairs of the world impinge heavily on the potential lovers. The Aesir, who require bitterly cold weather to thrive, emerge from their periodic estivation with the coming of a harsh winter, and this time invade the mortal realms with weapons that power much greater risks than previous invasions.

A government assassin, tasked with finding Semblances -- Aesir who, in dying, take the body of a dying mortal and keep it animated in order to spy and commit sabotage -- comes to believe that Robinson is a Semblance. We know that he is not, and the dramatic irony of knowing that Robinson is the target of a magical assassin provides a great deal of the suspense of the story.

There are many other details and characters that enliven the story and flesh out its reality. I found myself so engaged in listening to the audiobook that it was seriously interfering with my ability to engage with what I have to think of as "real life."

Even though the ending of The Invisible College is perfectly satisfying, it still left me wanting to know more about the struggle with the Aesir, and as I'm well into the second volume, The Violence of Sound, I find that the world is deeper and more intriguing than I had thought.

In a literary world that includes the works of Brandon Sanderson, it's hard to come across a magic system that is both new and intriguing, Sanderson having covered such a vast swath of magical country. But Wheeler, to my delight, has created a world that is fresh and piercingly clever, populated with characters who are engaging, believable, and -- even the antagonists -- likeable.

Besides magic, Wheeler's world is also imbued with moral and ethical rules which most of the characters -- especially the ones we like best -- try to live by. As with the world of Jane Austen's fiction, we admire these people for their concern with causing no harm and, when possible, doing good for others.

It's one of the things we like most about most fantasy worlds, even ones like Mark Lawrence's, where some of our heroes seem to be anti-heroes for a while. It's the feat Asimov pulled off in the original Foundation trilogy, where the Mule is a dangerous antagonist with extraordinary magical powers -- but one whom we come to care about, pity, and even admire.

Fantasy allows writers to sharpen and clarify the moral universe -- so often sloppy and unfathomable in real life -- and Wheeler works this sort of alchemy with the best of the fantasists. I trust Wheeler, from past reading, to bring all the threads of the Invisible College stories together into a satisfying and illuminating whole.

If you have not yet read any Jeff Wheeler, I urge you to try him out -- even venturing into this not-yet-finished tetralogy (quadrivium?), because the first volume, at least, is a complete story, which I loved from beginning to end.

That would be the end of this review, were it not for some interesting points that would only matter to people who have already read it. But in the belief that at least some of you will soon join that category, I deliberately overstay my welcome with a few additional comments:

Wheeler is playing some interesting games with apparently parallel universes. This is a fantasy world, where trains run by magic and magic works by invoking invisible intelligences which have attitudes and personal desires that have to be taken into account.

Yet in all this strangeness, it is clear that the characters are speaking English. Vocabulary and spelling are very specifically invoked, particularly with a distinction being drawn between "glamor" and "glamour." Tannhauser is German, and people from our history exist in this fantasy world, doing different jobs. Schopenhauer turns up as an opera composer, for instance, and there are other such overlaps with our universe.

They don't seem significant to the plot -- no events from our history seem to be mirrored in the book in any meaningful way. But the distraction they cause is minimal -- more a pleasant idea than a jarring anomaly. Hardly worth mentioning, except that I did notice it and I was disappointed that the crossovers seem so meaningless.

It's another trivial matter, I suppose, but I do appreciate it when writers use language correctly. Wheeler has apparently heard the words of the marriage vows in the English Book of Common Prayer, but he repeatedly wrote "till death us depart" instead of "till death us do part."

Such solecisms are rare, but should not exist; where was Wheeler's copy editor, who is supposed to save him from mistaken references?

(Of course, I'm writing this review without a copy editor, myself, and while I'm sure that the word "depart" is used where it should not be, I have not checked to make sure my memory of the wording in the novel and in the Book of Common Prayer is correct. Maybe it's "do us part" in the original. So I may be just as incorrect, in my own way, as Wheeler. But then, I'm not getting paid for this review. Wheeler is getting paid for his novel, and if he had a copy editor, that copy editor needs a bit of wrist-slapping for carelessness.)

There were a few wrong notes in the narration of the audiobook, too. In the old days, producers and directors made sure their narrators knew how to pronounce all the words. I don't mean the made-up words peculiar to the novel, but even the English-language words.

This narrator is required by the text to say "adjutant" and "valise" several times, and she invariably puts the stress on the wrong syllable. It's not "a-JOO-tant," but "AD-joo-tant," not "VAL-eess," but "va-LEESS" (or va-LEEZ). Despite this, she is a very good narrator; she, and we, are victims of the recent trend of narrators producing their own recordings, without guidance or correction.

Quibbles, really; but the literature is better served by taking care of such details than by the attitude of "good enough for who it's fer."

(And yes, as with many German names, I did have to look up "Schopenhauer" to make sure there was a C in it. Listening to audiobooks has the drawback that you can't see the spelling of names and new words. I looked up "aesir" as well. So I'm not completely lazy.)

Now let's get back to the main point of my review: Jeff Wheeler is a first-rate fantasist, and The Hidden College is a first-rate novel, which I think you are likely to enjoy so much that you will be annoyed that I even brought up these slight negative details.