Zodiac Academy: Ruthless Fae — Zodiac Academy Book 2

The Second Book Hits Its Stride

Zodiac Academy: Ruthless Fae is the second book in Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti’s wildly popular dark-academia romantasy series, and it is where the saga begins to find its footing. The Vega twins — Tory and Darcy, long-lost heirs to the Solarian throne — return to the magical Zodiac Academy for a second semester, only to find the four ruling Heirs escalating their campaign to break them. But amid the bullying and the brutal trials, unexpected alliances form and undeniable attractions begin to complicate the clean enemy lines the first book drew.

If The Awakening introduced the world, Ruthless Fae deepens it. The Fae realm of Solaria gains political and historical texture, the astrological magic system is explored in more detail, and the enemies-to-lovers tension that powers the whole series starts to take its real shape. It is unapologetically a middle-building book — no resolutions arrive — but for readers invested in the series, it is where the machine starts running at full speed.

What a Second Book Needs to Do

The second book in a long fantasy series faces a specific challenge: the world has been built, the characters introduced, the central conflict established — now the author must deepen rather than merely continue. Ruthless Fae succeeds at this deepening task in several respects. The Fae world of Solaria becomes more substantial as Peckham and Valenti reveal its history, its political structures, and the deeper stakes of the conflict over the throne. What appeared in book one as a campus power struggle begins to reveal itself as something with genuine civilizational weight.

The enemies-to-lovers dynamic between the Vega twins and the Heirs — the series’ central romantic engine — develops in book two in the directions readers of the genre will expect, but with enough specificity of character and situation that the development feels particular rather than formulaic. The Heirs are not interchangeable antagonists; they have distinct personalities, distinct relationships with the twins, and distinct arcs that the series will pursue across seven more books. Ruthless Fae begins to differentiate those arcs clearly, investing in character detail that will pay dividends much later in the series.

The Astrological Magic System

One of the series’ most distinctive elements — the astrological power system, in which each Fae’s abilities are determined by their star sign — receives more thorough development in Ruthless Fae than was possible in the first book. The magic system is not merely a cosmetic feature of the world but a genuine element of the social structure: certain signs are more powerful than others, combinations of signs interact in specific ways, and the power differentials between the Vega twins and the established Heirs are rooted in the magical logic of the zodiac. This gives the conflicts of the book a foundation beyond personality and politics.

Series Investment and Its Mechanics

Ruthless Fae is emphatically not a standalone novel, and it does not try to be. Its value is entirely conditional on the reader’s investment in the series that surrounds it, and it is written with that conditional value in mind — the book deepens and extends rather than initiates or concludes. For readers who have committed to the series, this is entirely appropriate; the emotional and narrative rewards of book two are the rewards of continuation rather than of standalone resolution. For readers who have not yet started, it is the clearest possible signal to begin at book one.

Dark Academy as a Genre

Zodiac Academy is one of several series that helped consolidate the dark academy subgenre in the early 2020s. The subgenre combines boarding school or university settings with dark fantasy or paranormal elements, enemies-to-lovers romance, and a willingness to pursue consequences that lighter academy fiction avoids. Ruthless Fae, as the second book in the series, does the work of confirming that the darkness of the first book was not an anomaly — the world is genuinely dangerous, the antagonists genuinely threatening — while beginning the process of complicating the enemy/ally binary that defines the genre’s characteristic romance arc. The Heirs will not remain simply enemies, and Ruthless Fae plants the seeds of the more complex dynamics that define the series from book three onward.

The Twin-Protagonist Structure

A structural feature that distinguishes Zodiac Academy from most of its romantasy peers is its commitment to two protagonists rather than one, and Ruthless Fae is where that choice starts to pay real dividends. Tory and Darcy Vega are not interchangeable; the authors give them distinct temperaments, distinct coping strategies, and — crucially — distinct romantic trajectories among the Heirs, so that the reader is effectively following two parallel enemies-to-lovers arcs that occasionally intersect. This doubles the emotional surface area of the series and lets Peckham and Valenti hedge their bets: a reader who finds one twin’s pairing less compelling has a second to invest in, and the contrast between the sisters’ choices becomes its own source of tension. It also reinforces the series’ central theme of sisterhood as the one bond that predates and outlasts every romance, a counterweight to the swooning that keeps the books from collapsing into pure wish fulfillment. Ruthless Fae is where the dual structure stops feeling like a gimmick and starts feeling like the point.

The Verdict

Ruthless Fae succeeds at the hardest job a second book has: deepening rather than merely continuing. The world-building expands meaningfully, the Heirs begin to differentiate into distinct characters with their own arcs, and the romantic tension escalates with enough specificity to feel particular rather than formulaic. It is pure setup for a longer story and has no standalone value, so readers wanting fast resolution will chafe — but for those who loved book one, it is the confirmation that the series knows exactly where it is going.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — The series finds its stride: richer Solarian world-building, a deepening astrological magic system, and escalating enemies-to-lovers tension — pure middle-building, but confidently done.