Arcana Academy Review — 3 Stars
By Mallory Mills
(Contains spoilers)
While I did give Arcana Academy three stars, I’d like to specify that it’s a very generous three stars, and comes almost exclusively from the book’s first half. Within its opening act, we are introduced to Clara, who has spent the last year enduring the kingdom’s most notorious prison. Through her, we learn of the magic system upon which this world is established: certain people known as ‘arcanists’ wield magic tarot cards, each of which contains its own individual power. We also learn of Clara’s unique ability, which allows her to create tarot without specialised ink so long as she adds a drop of her own blood to the solution in use. It’s a well-known formula — a protagonist with abilities that defy the pre-established rules of her magical world — but the novel’s first half balances intrigue with interpersonal struggle to keep the plot from stagnating. This doesn’t mean it’s without its issues, however.
To her credit, Kova does a serviceable job of immersing us within the academy setting, which is undeniably the book’s biggest draw. But where Kova works carefully to curate the ‘dark academia’ aesthetic, the worldbuilding is not treated with such care. We are told through expositional dialogue that an unknown figure, dubbed simply ‘The Fool,’ went on a journey wherein they met various magic-users and showed them how to channel their powers into cards. But nobody’s certain as to where the magic originated, or why that magic had to be channelled through tarot. It’s just vague enough to sound impressive, but lacks anything substantive to make it plausible.
We also don’t spend enough time in the academy itself, as Clara is rarely shown actually attending class and engaging in lessons. In many regards, Clara feels overpowered. She enters the academy with an advantage over the other students, having spent her childhood learning to ink tarot when it’s usually impossible for children to do so. Because of this, she spends much of the book bragging to herself about how easily she could best her peers. Any training we do witness is almost exclusively off-page, or mentioned in casual asides like ‘Clara had spent the past few weeks running laps and training her body.’ As such, her abilities feel convenient and unearned; even after we discover she’s the physical embodiment of the Wheel of Fortune, she’s still more powerful than her fellow majors.
The inclusion of the major arcana as people was a concept I really enjoyed, but it felt underutilised. After an initial introduction, we see little of the other majors, and we never quite get a proper grasp of what it truly means to be a major — the potential implications, the vulnerability, the risk. We know the king keeps certain majors for himself, sequestering them away in his palace for his own personal use. This was an element I would’ve enjoyed exploring further, especially compared to some of the petty grievances Clara is so concerned with. I feel Kaelis could’ve disclosed Clara’s identity as the Wheel of Fortune way sooner; it simply doesn’t make sense why he keeps Clara in the dark about so many things. He brings her to the Academy and presents her as his bride, but he doesn’t say what exactly he wants from her until a third of the way through the book. This feels like it was done to maintain an air of mystery around Kaelis and facilitate snarky banter between our main couple, but keeping Clara in the dark is actively detrimental to Kaelis’ plans. If he’d just disclosed his intentions to her from their initial meeting — ‘Hey, I’d like to overthrow the king and fix the injustice in the kingdom, you in?’ — we could’ve cut out so much unnecessary and tiresome back-and-forth.
Another issue is the breadth of its characters. There are…simply too many. Truly a behemoth amount. The moment the Starcrossed Club came on page, I knew I’d forget all of them immediately; there are too many names to remember, and they’re all so shallow and flat that they blur into one indistinguishable person. Except for Jura, whose only personality trait is baking. I truly think we could’ve merged some of the characters together to lessen the cast and strengthen their personalities, which would’ve allowed us to develop any actual semblance of attachment to them. As it stands, I cared less for the fate of these characters than I do the result of the AFL 2025 footy grand final.
Although the romance is, by definition, an enemies-to-lovers dynamic, I didn’t quite buy them as ‘enemies.’ Sure, Clara claims to hate the crown, but she spends an inordinate amount of time trying to justify to herself why she finds Kaelis attractive. Kaelis is known to have wiped out an entire clan, but Clara just tells herself ‘Well, they were just nobles. I don’t even like nobles.’ He wiped out an entire populace of people, and you don’t care because he’s hot?
And this would’ve been fine if Clara had been established as a little morally dubious herself. Maybe she truly loathes the upper class and wants to see them all dead. But Clara still befriends and emphasises with nobles. She’s shown to be kind and compassionate, often struggling to reconcile her desire for Kaelis with her own internal values. So in setting up the central romance this way, Clara comes off as fickle and wishy-washy much of the time, unable to determine her own feelings.
Not that we ever see Kaelis’ supposed wickedness on page, mind. His activities seem to consist of brooding, making idle threats, providing important exposition, and pushing Clara up against the nearest surface. Oh, unless he’s threatening to send her back to Halazar — which he does frequently throughout the first half of the book. But once we hit the midway point, Kaelis is quick to change his tune; suddenly he’s cradling Clara in his arms and whispering promises in her ear, claiming ‘I’d never let them send you back to Halazar.’ The whole thing feels uncomfortable and manipulative, but Clara never seems to acknowledge this. Rather, Kaelis’ threats are treated as an irremovable caveat of his character— that of the tortured, misunderstood bad boy, with a harrowing past and an all-black wardrobe to match the shredded remnants of his tortured soul.
This isn’t to say Kaelis is particularly cunning — Clara is simply moronic. Although she’s said on numerous occasions to be smart and capable, she proves, time and again, to have only a single deteriorating brain cell. This can be seen when:
1) She meets Silas for the first time — a man who openly tells her he works for the king — and takes him along to meet up with her rebel friends. Later on, she wonders if she can truly trust him…a bit late for that now, Clara. He knows where your friends live! He could hand them over to the crown at any moment!
2) When tasked with inking her ‘gold card,’ Clara struggles to decipher what special material she’ll have to use to activate it — even though she’s always been able to use blood to ink any tarot card she wants. Gee, I wonder what it could possibly be!
3) During her first wielding class, Clara asks the teacher why she should bother learning to wield cards with her mind when she can use her hands…even though she’d been attacked the previous scene and hadn’t been able to defend herself because her hands had been pinned. The teacher, rightfully, tells her off in front of everyone for being an idiot.
Moments like this undermine what everyone — Kaelis, the other students, Clara herself — tell us about her. We’re beaten over the head with how cunning she is, how experienced, how life as a fugitive has honed her mind into a sharpened blade. If this is Oricalis’ metric of intelligence, they’d think me an absolute genius.
And this stupidity doesn’t extend exclusively to Clara: the cartoonishly evil villain, Ravin, is also prone to moments of idiocy. In the novel’s final chapter, Ravin reveals himself as the embodiment of Death, and then attempts to kill Clara with the Death card. When he is unable to do so on account of not knowing her true last name, he chokes Clara out and demands she tell him…even though he could just kill her with his bare hands. Why does he need to do it with a card? He even says a few pages later, when Clara refuses to speak, that ‘he’ll just kill her the old-fashioned way.’ Okay, so why did he go to such trouble to learn her last name then? Did he just really want the theatricality of using a card?
The academy trials, at least, were enjoyable. The spars were engaging and relatively well-paced — though it was a bit hard to keep track of all the different cards and what they do — and the internal politics of the student body provided a point of compelling intrigue. But aside from these moments of reprieve, the book’s second half is comprised almost entirely of meetings with the Starcrossed Club, cryptic conversations with Kaelis, and half-hearted attempts to uncover the whereabouts of Clara’s supposedly deceased sister. It’s truly a slog to wade through, especially when an entire 272 pages are devoted to it.
Furthermore, the final act isn’t satisfying enough to warrant enduring them. It darts from scene to scene and sprinkles the occasional arbitrary reveal throughout, in what is a grasping and rather transparent attempt to keep readers eager for the second instalment. Having long stopped caring, I could only absorb these discoveries with calm indifference. And as I closed Arcana Academy for the final time, I was met with a muted kind of relief to be done with it. I attribute this fatigue to the sheer length of the novel; its page count doesn’t correlate to the breadth of its plot, and thus it outstays its welcome far past the point of my patience.
I must also touch on the language of the book itself. While it’s marketed as an adult romantasy, the prose and characters both feel markedly juvenile at times, and the book suffers from a severe case of overwriting, with details repeated and spoon-fed to the audience. The writing can also be quite clunky, so much so that I had to go back and reread particular sentences several times in order to ascertain their meaning. This is my personal favourite:
‘Or I’ll show you why you should reconsider being so eager for a good fuck that you’d open your legs for nothing more than an illusion before the whole academy.’
Woof.
It may seem, after such a bevy of issues, that I didn’t enjoy Arcana Academy at all. But the first half was so promising that I couldn’t bring myself to rate it lower than 3 stars. This made for an ultimately disappointing experience, one that steadily depletes in quality over the course of the story. It has a unique magic system, but my love of tarot wasn’t enough to forgive its meandering pace and frustrating protagonist. I won’t deny the series’ potential — or Kova’s ability to produce a superior sequel, of which I don’t doubt she is capable — but I will decidedly not be continuing with it.
Mallory Mills is a Melbourne-based writer specialising in both fiction and creative non-fiction. She loves cats and hates writing bios.
