An Arcane Inheritance: a derivative dark academia
You can probably guess the entire premise and plot just by looking at the cover, title, and blurb. Everything is derivative. The obviously sinister secret societies are lifted straight from Ninth House. The special wild magic is lifted from Legendborn. The horny rivalry between people who are unrealistically smart brings to mind The Atlas Six. Even the name of the fake Ivy League is the same one used in Bunny.
Basically An Arcane Inheritance is not exactly original, and the tropes here aren't even executed well. The banter sounds like MCU dialogue; minor characters are sidelined; the nonsense magic system is terribly explained; the love interest (who engages in romance under false pretenses, which is a trope that annoys me, because it raises questions about consent and power dynamics that don't get addressed) takes up way more page time than he deserves; the plot drives itself right off the rails in the end when it culminates in a baffling and unsatisfying twist. I could come up with a dozen more complaints, but honestly, the book's greatest sin is its ending. I don't want to spoil it, but the big reveal is just bad. If I'm being generous, I can say the reveal is thematically resonant, but I've seen other books execute the same exact twist without belly-flopping so hard in the process.
Ellory, our quippy and self-righteous strong female protagonist who you've definitely met before in other YA and NA novels, is the most interesting part of this book, though by the final act, I lost interest in her. Her journey is, at first, easy to invest in. She forms a complex array of relationships, some adversarial and some more positive, with roommates, classmates, and professors. We also learn a lot about her past and her complicated family dynamics back home. One subplot involves her realizing that she should drop her ambitions of becoming a lawyer in order to instead pursue her passion for journalism, even though this shift towards a less lucrative major may upset her family, especially the aunt who raised her. This piece of interpersonal conflict is one of the few story elements that kept me turning the pages, but it never gets resolved. We don't find out what she tells her aunt. We don't find out how her aunt reacts. We don't find out how Ellory balances ambitions, finances, and family. These questions becomes one of many story beats that don't end up mattering at all. Everything good about Ellory is shunted aside when the big reveal comes along to essentially change the entire story by turning seemingly important subplots into insignificant illusions. If those subplots had been uncompelling, then it wouldn't have bothered me when, out of nowhere, they get completely dropped. Unfortunately they're the only compelling part of the whole narrative, so their disappearance undermines every redeeming quality in this book.
The narrative voice is strong and witty enough that I'd be willing to read something else from the author, but this one is just a poor copy and paste of Ninth House, Legendborn, and The Atlas Six. (The Babel comp in the blurb is not even close to accurate. A Deadly Education is a little more accurate -- El and Ellory share a good number of traits in common, and the humor and writing style are kind of similar in both books, though it's not executed as well in An Arcane Inheritance.)
I desperately wanted to like this book, so all the negativity in this review may just be a reflection of my sheer disappointment, and not what An Arcane Inheritance actually deserves based on quality alone. Even so, I do think the quality is still pretty low.