An Arcane Inheritance
Kamilah Cole
Hardcover/Paperback/Ebook/Audiobook
ISBN: 978-1464216916
Poisoned Pen Press, December 30, 2025, 428 pgs

When Ellory Morgan left Jamaica as a child to attend American schools, the Ivy League seemed like a distant, hopeful dream. Now that she’s been accepted to the prestigious (and fictional) Warren University, it’s become a bit of a nightmare. As a twenty-one-year-old freshman law student on a merit scholarship, the pressure is intense. So are the surroundings. Ellory is socially ostracized and continually confronted by her privileged legacy colleagues, especially golden boy Hudson Graves, one of the few other Black students. Trying to keep up with her studies and her family responsibilities means she’s overworked and burnt out before the semester gets fully underway. When she starts having visions, seeing ghosts, and finding out that she may have a personal magical connection to Warren’s elite secret society, it’s almost a relief. Evil villains can be fought directly, but unfair systems are a bit harder to take down.

This book is two parts dark academia, two parts supernatural thriller, and one part romantasy. You have an idealized university populated by impossibly confident, rich, and petty students, with a little occult madness thrown in for good measure. You have ghosts, magic, haunted visions, and a constant creeping sense that the supernaturally mysterious has an explanation somewhere. Finally, there’s a love triangle, presented in a straightforward, unselfconscious way without unbalancing the supernatural aspects of the story. In fact, it contributes at some points.

This isn’t a mix I’m overly familiar with, and to be honest, it took some time for me to get into this. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very pleasant read that really leans into everything good and bad about academia. There’s a lot of sensory detail and student nostalgia that make some parts of this very cozy, in a New England autumn way. On the other hand, the emotional and social stress of being a first-generation Black immigrant woman at an Ivy League school is laid out so well that some scenes approach psychological horror. Ellory is stressed out and deep in the throes of realizing, like a lot of first-gen students, that everyone’s hard work isn’t weighted equally and life may not ever be fair for her. Despite that, she’s doing her best, making friends, dating, and consigning herself to a life of working hard for the rest of her life to try to stay caught up. Even Ellory’s privileged best friends, who are really nice kids who bring a lot of fun to the story, do their part in the social inequity dance. The unfairness of it all is so intensely painful, and so perfectly expressed, that the shifting power dynamics and danger introduced by magic almost seem anticlimactic. Sure, Ellory can do magic. What she can’t do is tell her horrible classmates that they’re racist to her face for fear of bringing social backlash on herself. Somehow, that’s worse.

Additionally, the magical and supernatural elements don’t make a lot of sense for a long while. I found myself constantly wondering what was going on, and why the characters weren’t asking certain questions, why some things were freaking everybody out while others were barely noted. There’s a mix of undead, occult, and timeline shenanigans here that’s not easy to connect at first. I couldn’t figure out whether the main characters weren’t supposed to know what they were doing or if I was missing something. Without spoiling the story for you, there’s a huge reason the magic system in this book flips between casual and expert so confusingly, and when you get there, it will all make a lot more sense. The author built Warren University brick-by-brick to make a point, and she brings it home with a smash. I went from asking what was going on and why there wasn’t more magic to a long reflective “ohhhhhhhh” when I realized that all of my predictions were wrong and the real magic was leading readers to a much nastier conclusion than I expected.

An Arcane Inheritance is a good addition to the ever-growing shelf of books about Black students in magical schools, alongside Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn Cycle, LaDarrion Williams’s Blood at the Root, and Antoine Bandele’s The Gatekeeper’s Staff. There are a lot of similar themes and experiences shared with An Arcane Inheritance, and it’s a gentler reading experience than all of those books right up until the end, which has a much nastier twist.