Arcana Academy
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Elise Kova on Arcana Academy
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A childhood deck waiting for the right storyThe idea of tarot as a magic system arrived before Kova had a career to put it in. She learned to read the cards around age eight and carried that practice into adulthood, knowing from the earliest days of her publishing life that the cards deserved a world. What held her back for years was not the system but the story around it: a set of rules for how magic works is not, on its own, a reason to turn pages.
I have wanted to write a book with Tarot as the magic system base for a really long time. I actually learned how to read Tarot when I was around eight years old. And so it’s been a part of my life for ages. And when I became an author, I knew I wanted to write that as the basis of a magic system. But a magic system is not a plot, it’s not a story. [paraphrased from audio]
Even once a plot began to form, around 2022 to 2023, Kova held back for a second reason. She had a clear sense of how the book should feel at its best, and an equally clear sense that she was not yet the writer who could deliver it. The gap between the idea and the skill to execute it was something she chose to close before committing to the page.
I knew I wanted to write a book that had tarot as the basis for the magic system... And then as I was developing it, it also felt quite ambitious to me at the time as an author. And I was like, I need to grow as an author because sometimes you sort of have those ideas that you’re like, I don’t have the technical skills yet as a writer to implement this the way I would want to. [paraphrased from audio]
Alongside the magic system, the academy setting itself carried a question that pulled Kova toward the genre. She had never written a true academy novel before Arcana Academy, and the form interested her less for its familiar conventions than for the political pressure it could apply: schools are places where someone decides who learns what.
I also love the questions that an academy can raise... you know, who controls knowledge? And how do they gatekeep it? And, you know, who do they give access to it? [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Cost, cards, and a completely different endingWhen Kova built the Arcana system, the first design decision was not what the cards could do but what using them would cost. She wanted two layers of cost running at once: a soft variation rooted in natural talent from person to person, and a hard mechanical rule that would press on every character who uses magic. The hard rule she settled on shaped the world’s entire political structure, because anything that is consumed must first be made, and whoever controls that production holds the power.
I love having magic systems that have a cost... I also wanted a hard cost in the sense of a limitation of every time a card was used, the card was destroyed. And that allowed me to create sort of these three parallel elements of the magic system, which is inking the cards, actually making them, reading them, which is the most akin to our world and then casting them. [paraphrased from audio]
The full system runs to 72 individual spells, each card tied to its real-world tarot meaning. Rather than asking readers to study the deck before opening chapter one, Kova built explanations directly into scenes: each card’s effect is spelled out the moment it appears. She placed the glossary at the book’s back rather than its front partly for practical reasons of access, and partly because some of the cards listed in the glossary should not exist in her world, and front-loading them would hand readers plot information before the story had earned it.
if I did my job right, you’re going to get everything. But if you are familiar with Tarot rather, you will hopefully get kind of some deeper layers that you’re just like, oh, I see what you did there, Elise. [paraphrased from audio]
Protagonist Clara Valliet enters the academy already able to ink and cast cards, trained illegally by her mother before the book begins. But Kova designed that competence to create friction rather than ease Clara’s path: the institution around her reads self-taught ability as technically wrong, regardless of its results. The structural question embedded in that conflict is whether formal instruction actually offers something self-taught ingenuity lacks, or whether it mainly enforces belonging.
There were characters in the original draft that are not in the final one. There are characters in the final one that were not in the original one. The ending of this book is completely different from the first draft. [paraphrased from audio]
Kova is a discovery writer whose first draft functions as a diagnostic rather than a blueprint. Finishing it tells her where the story actually wants to go, which is often somewhere other than where she started.
Arcana Academy was always conceived as the first book of a trilogy, and Kova sold it that way from the start. Her structural thinking about the middle volume in any three-book series is specific: the second book carries a double obligation that the first and third do not share.
you have to answer all of the questions of book one, but you have to answer them in a way that creates new tensions, mysteries, and questions that fuel you to your final conclusion in book three. [paraphrased from audio]
On what the book is wrestling with
Who controls the map, and who pays for tearing it upBefore Arcana Academy existed as a book, Kova had already established power as the load-bearing concept in her worldbuilding across multiple series. She returns to it not as a theme applied from the outside but as the first question she asks when building any society: who holds power, through what mechanisms, and what do those mechanisms cost the people shut out of them.
Power is the foundation of a lot of my worldbuilding because I think the way it influences people and places is fascinating and synonymous with most human history. So it becomes a natural pin for a lot of my narrative—who has power, how do they get it, what will they do to achieve it, and what will they do when they have it?
Clara’s arc in the book builds toward the possibility of dismantling a system built to exclude people like her. Kova is interested in what comes after that dismantling. The book sets up revolution as a genuine option and then immediately turns to the harder problem that the synthesis of destruction rarely addresses.
it is one thing to be the destroyer, to be the rebel, to break it all down. But then there comes the question of, okay, so let’s say you succeed, what then? And I think that... it is in some ways easier to destroy than it is to create. And Clara’s journey is very much of, ‘All right, you have the power to undo it all now. What are you going to put in its place?’ [paraphrased from audio]
The book’s counterweight to its political concerns is the question of how a genuinely good quality in a person becomes the lever someone else uses against them. Kova built this into Clara’s design from the start, giving her a loyalty to family that is presented as real and admirable and then showing exactly how that loyalty can be turned into a weapon.
one of the things that I tried to do was explore the duality of positives when they turn into flaws. So the main character Clara will do anything for her family or the people that she has sworn herself to and loves. And even though... she will make herself go, ‘I realize objectively this is not the most strategic or smart decision,’ but you can’t expect me to be strategic or smart when this person is holding someone I love hostage. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
A question the rebel has to answerClara’s loyalty is not a single feeling directed at one person. Kova mapped it across three separate relationships that each make a distinct claim on her: the grief that drives her, the protective role that shaped her daily life after that loss, and the community she built outside the family she was born into. The Starcrossed Club, the found family Clara assembles at the academy, is where Kova extends the definition of family beyond blood.
Clara as a character is so driven by family and all the forms it takes. She’s driven by her mother’s untimely death. Formed by protecting and guiding her sister following. And loyal to the found family she made in the Starcrossed Club.
Kaelis operates from almost the opposite position: no particular family pulling on him, his obligations running to a kingdom-scale political calculation. Their disagreement about where loyalty properly belongs is, in Kova’s framing, the real engine beneath the romance, and the question the series leaves open longest.