Below is the complete list of Zodiac Academy books in reading order, presented in publication order for the series by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.
Zodiac Academy Series
- The Awakening (2019)
Book details - Ruthless Fae (2019)
Book details - The Reckoning (2020)
Book details - Shadow Princess (2020)
Book details - Cursed Fates (2020)
Book details - Origins of an Academy Bully (2020)
Book details - The Big A.S.S. Party (2020)
Book details - Fated Throne (2020)
Book details - Heartless Sky (2021)
Book details - The Awakening As Told By the Boys (2021)
Book details - Sorrow and Starlight (2022)
Book details - Beyond the Veil (2023)
Book details - Live and Let Lionel (2024)
Book details - Restless Stars (2024)
Book details
About Zodiac Academy Series
Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti’s Zodiac Academy is the series most closely associated with their rise as major romantasy authors, but its appeal is not just that of a dark magical-school story. The academy premise is the entry point, not the limit. What begins with twins Tory and Darcy Vega being pulled into a brutal Fae world quickly expands into a much larger struggle involving inheritance, power, loyalty, and the right to rule. That widening scale is one of the main reasons reading order matters here. The series is built to accumulate pressure. Rivalries deepen, alliances shift, and later books depend heavily on the emotional and political damage done much earlier.
At the center of the story are the Vega twins, and the dual focus gives the series much of its energy. Their arrival at Zodiac Academy places them inside a setting ruled by hierarchy, humiliation, and supernatural status games, but the books are never only about surviving school. From the start, the academy is really a battleground for something larger. The sisters are not simply learning magic; they are entering a world that has already decided who should hold power and who should be crushed before they can claim it. That gives the early books their immediate tension and explains why the series grows so naturally into a broader fantasy conflict.
Tonally, Zodiac Academy sits firmly on the darker, more excessive end of romantasy and paranormal romance. The books lean into cruelty, obsession, enemies-to-lovers tension, emotional volatility, and high-stakes attraction. That intensity is part of their identity. But the series works because it eventually becomes bigger than its most provocative hooks. Beneath the academy bullying and fierce romantic entanglements is an ongoing story about legitimacy, family, survival, and resistance inside a world built on magical bloodlines and entrenched power.
Publication order matters because these books are not interchangeable episodes. They are written for escalation. The emotional payoff depends on spending time with betrayals, grudges, shifting desire, and the long aftereffects of violence and loss. Each book changes the terms of the next one. Read in sequence, the story widens from school-based conflict into a larger Solarian drama without losing the urgency of its central relationships. Read out of order, it is much easier to flatten the characters into archetypes and miss how much the series relies on cumulative damage and delayed payoff.
One point that can confuse readers is the relationship between Zodiac Academy and the other Solaria books. Ruthless Boys of the Zodiac is a connected prequel set earlier in the same world, and Darkmore Penitentiary also belongs to that wider setting. Those series enrich the universe and matter for readers who want the fullest possible Solaria experience, but they are not the core Zodiac Academy sequence itself. The main numbered Zodiac Academy books remain the spine of the story. The connected titles deepen the world rather than replace that central path.
There is also a practical distinction to keep in mind with later branded releases. Not every item carrying the Zodiac Academy name functions as a standard mainline novel in the same way as the central numbered arc. That makes it even more useful to follow a clear reading order rather than assuming every branded entry serves the same narrative role.
Taken as a whole, Zodiac Academy is best understood as the flagship Solaria saga: a dark academy fantasy that grows into a much larger romantasy series about power, inheritance, and emotional survival. Its real strength lies in the way it combines addictive serial momentum with a world that keeps widening around its central characters, making publication order not just helpful, but essential to how the story lands.