Arcana Academy by Elise Kova – Review

Published: July 22, 2025

Publisher: Del Rey

Series: Arcana Academy #1

Genre: Fantasy, Romance

Pages: 557 (Kindle)

My Rating: 4.5 Stars

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis:
A woman who wields magical tarot cards lands herself in a false engagement with the headmaster of a mysterious academy in this first installment of an enthralling fantasy romance series from the bestselling author of A Deal with the Elf King.

Clara Graysword has survived the underworld of Eclipse City through thievery, luck, and a whole lot of illegal magic. After a job gone awry, Clara is sentenced to a lifetime in prison for inking tarot cards-a rare power reserved for practitioners at the elite Arcana Academy.

Just when it seems her luck has run dry, the academy’s enigmatic headmaster, Prince Kaelis, offers her an escape-for a price. Kaelis believes that Clara is the perfect tool to help him steal a tarot card from the king and use it to re-create an all-powerful card long lost to time.

In order to conceal her identity and keep her close, Kaelis brings Clara to Arcana Academy, introducing her as the newest first-year student and his bride-to-be.

Thrust into a world of arcane magic and royal intrigue, where one misstep will send her back to prison or worse, Clara finds that the prince she swore to hate may not be what he seems. But can she risk giving him power over the world-and her heart? Or will she take it for herself?

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I’ve really enjoyed Elise Kova’s self published romantasy books so obviously I was pretty excited to see she was launching a whole new series set at a magical school. Arcana Academy is a wonderful blend of subterfuge, tarot magic, and a will-they-won’t-they romance. I guess some might also label it as enemies to lovers which is also kind of accurate. 

Arcana Academy follows Clara Graysword, purveyor of fine and very illegal tarot cards, who is introduced to us after nearly a year in a high security prison. Clara has been wasting away because she was finally caught after years of crafting tarot cards without the proper education and sanction from the crown. Now she’s being brought before one of the very men responsible for her imprisonment – Prince Kaelis, headmaster at Arcana Academy – and he offers her freedom in exchange for helping him steal tarot cards from his father, the king. She will enter Arcana Academy as a student with the added burden (or perhaps boon) of being declared the heir to a lost noble house and Kaelis’s fiancée. Though she has a certain degree of protection because of this, Clara still must earn her place in one of the four houses along with the other hopefuls. The penalty for failing to do so is a branding and a one way trip to the magical work houses. 

Clara is a likable rogue with a mysterious past that she’s not even certain of thanks to her secretive and now deceased (probably via murder) mother. She has more reason than just her freedom to cooperate with Kaelis’s whims. Her sister joined the academy a year prior and is now missing, she thinks Kaelis may have had something to do with her mother’s murder, and Clara also plans to stop Kaelis and the King from fulfilling their plans to summon the World tarot card, which grants the user a single wish. 

Kaelis is the typical dark, brooding black sheep prince. He’s got edgy purplish hair that reminds me of a generic anime character and he’s probably harboring an actual sense of decency behind a prickly outer visage. He has a cat named Priss and that wins him points in my book. Kaelis is also feared throughout the kingdom for reverse wielding a tarot card to destroy Clan Hermit – the very noble house he’s claiming Clara originated from. Frustratingly, I was left wondering if this was true for the entirety of the book.

Let’s get my biggest issue with this book out of the way because other than this, I loved it. Clara and Kaelis are like, twenty-two and are super skilled and worldly, and Kaelis is running an academy and has been since he was a teenager. Because skill at tarot defiiiiinitely translates to skill as an administrator of an academic facility and all the dull administrative stuff that goes along with that. Why, oh why will authors not age up their characters to at least somewhere a bit closer to thirty in instances like this? Clara at least has been sneaking about for YEARS at this point trying to provide for her younger sister and cavorting with the secretive Starcrossed Club in the city. 

Overall though? I really had a great time with Arcana Academy after I decided to simply ignore the characters’ ages at the beginning. Clara has a great group of friends in the academy, there are some fun classroom scenes, and I like that Clara actually has to adjust her tarot technique to fit the academic standards since she wasn’t formally taught. Kaelis and Clara have fun rapport even though they spend so much of the book at odds. Now, I do wish they had communicated a little better because the bad communication trope annoys me but real life people communicate badly too! I also thought it was really fun that they definitely didn’t like each other but had to do the whole ‘fake engagement’ thing and make it convincing, while the whole time they both think the other is like, super hot, but they won’t admit it. I’m most definitely excited to get my hands on the sequel!