I purchased a copy of Zodiac Academy: The Awakening, by Caroline Peckham & Susanne Valenti.

If you’re one of the Fae, elemental magic is in your blood. And apparently it’s in ours. As twins born in the month of Gemini, we’re a rare breed even in this academy of supernatural a-holes.

Changelings were outlawed hundreds of years ago but I guess our birth parents didn’t get the memo. Which means we’re totally unprepared for the ruthless world of Fae.

Air. Fire. Water. Earth.

No one has ever harnessed all four of them, until we arrived. And it hasn’t made us any friends so far.

As the rarest Elementals ever known, we’re already a threat to the four celestial heirs; the popular, vindictive bullies who happen to be some of the hottest guys we’ve ever seen. It doesn’t help that they’re the most dangerous beasts in the Academy. And probably on earth too.

Our fates are intertwined, but they want us gone. They’ve only got until the lunar eclipse to force us out and they’ll stop at nothing to succeed.

We never knew we had a birthright to live up to but now that we do, we intend to claim our throne.

We can’t expect any help from the faculty when it comes to defending ourselves. So if the dragon shifters want some target practice, the werewolves want someone to hunt or the vampires fancy a snack then we have to be ready. But we’ve been looking after each other for a long time and fighting back is in our blood.

Today’s horoscope: totally screwed.

This will be ranty. Yes, I had feelings about this book, few of them good. So, I’m just going to dump them on the page, stream-of-consciousness style. There will also be some minor spoilers. (You’ve been warned.)

I’ll start small. I often have a problem with academy-based bully romances (and despite these characters being 18, this is very much a high school, not university setting). The problem is that the male characters are supposed to be all dark and scary and ALPHA, and they are instead immature and juvenile. Like, I imagine these 18-19-year-old “men,” these sophomores, trying to be all badass and just want to laugh at them instead. Like, “baby sit down.” That is 100% the case here. Up until the very end, half of the “oh, they’re so dangerous” scenes are genuinely just cruel pranks followed by the guys laughing and running away with a fist bump. The gravitas does not translate even a little.

Second, here’s the thing about bully romance: it requires some romance. I read all the bullying to get to the romance payoff in the end. Without it, this book is just hundreds of pages of two girls being unreasonably bullied and humiliated by everyone around them, and one of them killed. Yes, I could say almost killed. But absent intervention from an outside party, Tory would be dead. So, I won’t grant the Heirs the grace of saying they almost killed her. For all intents and purposes, they were killing her.

I know there are a lot more books in this series. Romance supposedly comes at some point. This means that at least some of the men will get a redemption arc. I won’t deny a certain curiosity. However, I dislike these men so intensely that I don’t think they deserve redemption arcs. I don’t want to see them forgiven and rewarded by getting the girl. I know there is a book that is the same as this one from the men’s POV that will likely show them to be conflicted, and all their glee as an act. I don’t want to read it because I don’t think they even deserve that accommodation. And I don’t want to watch the women being lowered in my esteem by accepting and trusting them.

There were several points in this book where the FMCs were overly and stupidly trusting, with expected results. At one point in the early page 400s, one of them thinks, “I don’t know if I can trust him,” and I was like, “Yes, you do! You 100% know you can’t trust him or any of them. You know this without a doubt because you have been shown repeatedly, and nothing else has been presented that would confuse your understanding on this point. They have ONLY been untrustworthy. They have been hot and untrustworthy and nothing else. That’s the entirety of their character.”

I was legitimately angry each time (because there are more than a few) they stupidly offered themselves up to be abused by men they knew would do so. Like, “girls, you know they can control you with a touch. So, why are you allowing him to take both of your hands without flinching? You know the wolves are out to get you. So, why are you accepting the invitation to ride off into the woods with them? You know these men have and will humiliate you at EVERY TURN, so why are you kissing them?” I appreciate that the FMCs were in a difficult spot. But their clear stupidity made me angry.

There came a point when I was like, “I won’t blame you for the Heirs’ actions, but I will absolutely blame you for allowing the vast majority of it. For continually putting yourself in a position to give them access and the ability to do the horrible things they do.” Not once did the trust the FMC offered, which was taken advantage of to abuse them, make sense. Like, there was no logical reason for them to offer it up and put their bodies in a position to be abused, humiliated, and killed. But my anger wasn’t just at girls for being stupidly naive. I mean, they were, but my anger was mostly because they were generally smart most of the time. (I actually really liked them.) So the naivety didn’t feel in character. The motivation for deciding to do the stupid things was absent. On one page, they know they can’t trust the Heirs; on the next, they’re making themselves ridiculous and (unbelievably) vulnerable to them.  So their stupidity was just stupid. And that’s on the authors more than the characters, honestly.

Next, for a lot of the book, the sisters cannot resist mental compulsions. Anyone can tell them to do something, and they cannot resist the order. In a world where it is stressed repeatedly (and shown in relation to some things) that fae take what they want if they have the strength to take it, that is full of sexual inuindo and humiliation, and four men are willing to kill to convince the women to leave, you will not convince me that rape would be off the table (or that other men wouldn’t simply take advantage of it). In fact, I firmly believe it would have been one of the first things on the table and never removed. And while I do not enjoy rape in my entertainment, I respect even less authors who do not have the balls to include it when they sculpt a whole world and write characters who would 100% be rapists. The absence screams louder than the on-page act. Either accept that you wrote a story that requies rape in order to be logically consistent or write a reason it’s not.

Lastly, there is also some lazy writing and plotting—professors who are basically named after their element. Think like Professor Pyro for learning a fire skill.  There’s a side character who is pseudo-Latinx and just slips the occasional Spanish word in (despite being fae). (There’s some heavy-handed foreshadowing going on with him, too.) The characterization of every other female character is cliché in the worst way, etc.

All in all, the fact that other people swear this series gets so good does pique my curiosity. But I basically hated this. I don’t think I’ll continue.

Other Reviews:

Book Review: Zodiac Academy: The Awakening By Caroline Peckham & Susanne Valenti

Book Review: The Awakening (Zodiac Academy #1)