Kamilah Cole, the bestselling author of young adult books, makes her adult fantasy debut with AN ARCANE INHERITANCE. This absorbing, haunting work of dark academia is set at an elite Ivy League school with a history cloaked in magic, murder and mayhem.

Jamaican-born and Astoria-raised Ellory Morgan knows that nothing in life will ever be handed to her. Sent to live with her aunt in New York in hopes of securing a better life, Ellory has worked, saved and achieved endlessly in an effort to earn an elite education, become a lawyer and make her family proud. After deferring her enrollment to Princeton --- and arguing with her aunt about the value of community college --- Ellory is shocked when she receives an embossed letter inviting her to test for admission at Warren University, an Ivy League college in Hartford, Connecticut, which isn’t even on her radar. But with Warren offering her a full scholarship, including room and board, she takes the leap.

Ellory’s first semester at Warren has been tough. The classes are all high-level, and pre-law is no joke. She also struggles with feeling nameless and faceless among her wealthy, privileged classmates. At 21, she is undoubtedly the oldest freshman, and her 18-year-old classmates have never once had to consider a future that is just out of reach. Many of them come from moneyed families with businesses and connections that all but guarantee them financial security upon graduation, regardless of how well they perform in their classes.

Ellory, on the other hand, must maintain a strong GPA in order to keep her scholarship. Between the workload and the microaggressions, her plate is too full to even consider attempting her real dream: becoming an investigative journalist, the first step of which would mean applying to work on the school paper, the Warren Communique. And then there’s her biggest problem: Hudson Graves.

"Richly developed, complex and lyrically written, AN ARCANE INHERITANCE is a genre-bending masterpiece that blends enemies-to-lovers romance with dark academia and enough investigative journalism to rival the best whodunit in a package that glitters with magic."

Intolerably smart, devilishly handsome, and her near-equal in just about every discussion or argument, Hudson is exactly the kind of student Ellory knows she should avoid. He’s not just rich, he’s name-on-the-school-library rich. And for whatever reason, everywhere Ellory goes, there he is, scowling at her, dismissing her, or otherwise floating on his own airs. But there’s something else, too. Oftentimes, when they’re debating or challenging each other, Ellory gets the sense that they’ve had this conversation before --- that she knows what he will say before he even says it, that she…somehow knows his coffee order?

Call it chemistry, déjà vu or stress, but Hudson isn’t the only thing making Ellory feel a bit bewitched. On a walk home one night, she realizes she’s on a remote part of campus she’s never seen before, with the shadows of the trees stretching threateningly above her and the haunting shrill of a giggle filling the bitter cold air. Then, just as quickly as she became lost, she finds herself again, with almost no memory of where she went wrong or what was after her --- only the lingering sensation, near primal, of danger.

When Hudson invites Ellory to a salon at a popular professor’s home, the vision happens again, only this time Ellory walks away with a clue: a tattoo on her neck, in her handwriting, begging her to rEmember. The backwards E in her inked skin feels familiar to her, like a symbol she has seen on some old Warren history book. But it is not until she enlists Hudson to help her investigate that she realizes that Warren’s history dovetails with that of the occult.

To understand the link between Warren and the strange, déjà vu-like visions plaguing Ellory, you first need to know the school’s history. Founded in 1954 as a coeducational and integrated university, Warren began almost as a joke: a 300-acre campus of manicured lawns and gothic structures that aimed to teach its students about the arcane --- everything from witchcraft and voodoo to demonic bargains and dark magic. So it should have seemed strange when Warren was also declared an Ivy the very same year that it was founded, shedding its magical roots and becoming every bit the upstanding, storied institution it is today. Unlike Yale and Princeton and their secret societies, it seems that Warren has succeeded at the one thing that no secret society before it has ever done: actually keep a secret. That is, until Ellory walked on campus.

As Ellory and Hudson dive deeper into Warren’s dark history, Ellory’s visions grow in intensity. She soon discovers that she can wield magic herself, though it is unstable and unpredictable. When she and Hudson learn that eight scholarship students went missing in the college’s early years, and that determining what happened to them may be the key to figuring out what’s going on with Ellory, they embark on a dangerous, covert mission to the catacomb-like depths of Warren.

Given that the two are serious intellectuals (and so very well read!), their skepticism around magic is refreshing, giving the reader tremendous access into a world that, like the secret society it depicts, can be a bit shadowy and hard to explore. But with the evidence piling up, they are about to discover one thing: if magic is real --- and all clues point to yes --- then it is not only extant, but actively being used against Ellory. And until she and Hudson can discover who and why, she is in grave danger.

Richly developed, complex and lyrically written, AN ARCANE INHERITANCE is a genre-bending masterpiece that blends enemies-to-lovers romance with dark academia and enough investigative journalism to rival the best whodunit in a package that glitters with magic. Kamilah Cole is an adept, masterly set designer, with her descriptions of Warren’s gothic campus bordering on poetry at times without ever losing focus or strong grounding. She applies this same careful craft to every bit of her work --- from the palpable (so thick you could cut it with a knife!) tension between Ellory and Hudson to Ellory’s feelings of marginalization and racism.

It’s a difficult balance to achieve --- magic and reality, witchcraft and microaggressions --- but Cole blends every aspect so seamlessly that every page reads like a “day in the life,” with all the richness of a freshman semester and the mysticism and fantasy of the occult. It’s a truly intoxicating mix, and the fact that Cole’s characters feel as real as you or me only makes the book that much more compelling and unforgettable.

A perfect addition to the genre, AN ARCANE INHERITANCE is sure to draw new readers into the gothic spires and dusty tomes of dark academia. But more than that, it will teach them something new about challenging authority and speaking out against oppression.