Jaclyn Rodriguez Books

Jaclyn Rodriguez is one of the newest names on this site, and one of the fastest starts. Her debut, A Vow in Vengeance, published on 13 January 2026 and became an instant USA Today bestseller after landing on Goodreads' most anticipated list for the year. She is biracial, of Puerto Rican heritage, a proud member of the LGBT community, and lives in Tucson, Arizona with her husband, son and two dogs. When she is not writing she practises archery and takes apart her favourite films and television shows, which is a habit that shows in how tightly her plot beats are constructed.

A Vow in Vengeance opens the Immortal Desires series. Rune has to survive the Forge, a brutal college run by immortal druids where students compete for access to tarot magic. The magic system is the hook and the thing most reviews single out: powers keyed to the major arcana, with all the ambiguity that implies. A card that grants strength also carries its reversal. Rodriguez has said she loves a complicated romantic subplot, and the book bears that out, with alliances that shift depending on who needs whose card that week. It sits squarely in the dark academia tradition while running on a magic system that does not resemble anyone else's.

What defines her writing at this early stage is stakes that extend past the couple. Choices Rune makes ripple outward into the wider world rather than resolving neatly into a relationship beat, which is a structural discipline that a lot of debut romantasy does not attempt. The prose is contemporary and quick, chapters are short, and the competition frame keeps forward motion constant. She is also unusually good at the trap of the academy setting, which is that classes get boring fast. The Forge is not a school with a plot attached. The school is the plot.

On heat, A Vow in Vengeance sits around a three on our spice scale. Explicit content is present and on the page, but the book is not built around it, and the ratio leans heavily toward tension and consequence over frequency. For content, expect violence between students, coercive magical bargains, body horror tied to the card system, and a fair amount of on-page death. The tone is closer to a knife fight than a slow romance, so readers who want comfort should look elsewhere on the slow burn shelf.

Why she matters to a romantasy audience right now is timing and gap-filling. The enemies to lovers magic school subgenre has been crowded since Fourth Wing, and most entrants are riding the same dragon-shaped wave. Rodriguez went sideways instead: tarot rather than beasts, druids rather than a military, and a heroine whose leverage is knowledge rather than combat ability. That makes the book a genuine recommendation for readers who liked the structure of a competitive academy but are tired of the standard-issue version of it. She also writes queer characters as a matter of course rather than as an event, which a meaningful share of readers are actively looking for.

Where to start is easy, since there is only one book so far. Read A Vow in Vengeance. Book two in the Immortal Desires series is in progress, so this is a series worth getting in on early rather than waiting to binge. The honest caveat is that it is a debut and reads like one in places: the first fifty pages carry a heavy load of worldbuilding, and a couple of secondary characters in the Forge blur together before the halfway mark. Push through that and the back half is where the book earns its bestseller run. If tarot magic and a cutthroat school sound right but you want to see the trope done at longer length first, our enemies to lovers collection will give you the comparison set. If you want to know whether the tone suits you before committing, take the reader quiz.