Zodiac Academy: The Awakening by Caroline Peckham & Susanne Valenti Review: Brutal Fae Academy Fantasy Romance Ignites

Zodiac Academy: The Awakening opens on twin sisters Tory and Darcy Vega — Geminis, impulsive and headstrong — who learn they are heirs to a Fae throne they knew nothing about. The catch: claiming their birthright requires surviving Zodiac Academy, a school where students aged eighteen and older compete in a world where elemental power, celestial lineage, and sheer ruthlessness decide who rises and who breaks. The book's own campus orientation sets the tone immediately — as one passage reads, "Vampire bites, loss of limbs or getting lost in the wailing wood will not count as a valid excuse for being late to class." This is not a comforting magical school story. It is a survival narrative wrapped in astrological world-building, political intrigue, and dark romance, published originally by King's Hollow in August 2019 and later reissued in a print edition with a new cover and an exclusive bonus chapter.

One of the series' most distinctive design choices is its star sign-based magic system. Each student's elemental abilities and personality are tied to their celestial archetype — Gemini twins receive a particular kind of volatile, dual-natured power — and this astrological framework shapes not just combat and class hierarchy but the social and political fabric of Fae society itself. The world that Peckham and Valenti construct is richly detailed, integrating astrology into every layer of academy life rather than using it as surface decoration. The antagonist Lionel Acrux functions as the series' presiding villain — described by the authors themselves as giving Voldemort a run for his money in the evil-dictator category — establishing from book one that the political stakes are as dangerous as the campus ones.

Where comparable magical-academy stories lean into mentorship or found-family warmth, The Awakening deliberately strips those comforts away. Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words characterised the series as one where the academy is "far more brutal, abusive, and deeply damaging than Hogwarts could have imagined," and that darkness is structural, not incidental. The central themes — power, survival, trust, and resilience — play out through a brutally competitive environment where betrayal is commonplace and the twins must learn to rely on each other while resisting or navigating enemies on all sides. The romance threads are built on enemies-to-lovers tension and are explicitly spicy, with a reported heat level of four out of five. Readers drawn to morally grey characters and slow-burn tension under genuine threat will find the tonal pitch deliberate and consistent.

The Zodiac Academy series has grown into a genuine phenomenon, driven in large part by BookTok, and Peckham and Valenti — known to their fanbase as the "Twisted Sisters" — have sold over fifteen million books across their catalogue. The series carries Amazon and Wall Street Journal #1 bestselling status, and author Raven Kennedy has described the first book as "dark, spicy, and completely addictive." The twelve-book scope of the series signals a commitment to long-form serialised storytelling, and the first instalment's job is specifically to establish the world, its hierarchy, and its central tensions — a function it performs as the launchpad for an ambitious continuing narrative.

The Awakening is squarely positioned as upper YA and New Adult fiction, and readers who prefer gentler or cosier academy stories will find the tone actively hostile to comfort. The dark academy setting, explicit content, and unrelenting competitive brutality are design choices rather than flaws — but they do mean the book self-selects its audience firmly. Readers who enjoy romantasy with elemental magic, enemies-to-lovers dynamics, morally grey characters, and explicit scenes are the clear target, and within that readership the series has built a devoted and vocal following. As the opening volume of twelve, The Awakening is necessarily an introduction — readers looking for complete, self-contained narrative arcs within a single book will need to commit to the longer series journey from the outset.