A review by entirelybonkerz
Ruthless Fae by Susanne Valenti, Caroline Peckham

2.0

You guys know me by now, if you've been here long enough. I am a scholar.

I made the decision to read the entire zodiac academy series for anthropological reasons. I believe this entire series deserves to be studied so we can better understand human language and behavior and where we are heading towards as a species.

Also, I am just bored and curious. I really want to be able to wrap my head around how popular these books are and truly understand what makes people read 8 books in a single week and not be able to put it down. And I am not going to lie, I haven't been obsessed with a series since reading ACOTAR years ago, I want that high.

I am absolutely and completely jealous of every person who adores this series with all their heart. I want that, I want a series of books and characters I can't stop thinking about. I want to fall asleep, wake up and feel like they are with me.

But these guys just piss me the fuck off.

First of all: The zodiac "boys"

Specially Seth, I can't fucking stand Seth. They have no real personality or development. We learn some of them have mean parents, who are embarrassed of them or violent, ergo that turned them into little bullies. C'mon this isn't pre-school. I don't need a toilet water version of Chuck Bass.

So far these characters just lack the right motivation, they lack development and they COULD be awesome, but they are just being completely butchered with careless writing.

This feels like reading the first draft of a book, which brings me to my second point:

Zodiac Academy deserves to be republished IF it is REWRITTEN and actually edited by competent editors.

And I will say more: half of this book didn't need to exist. ZA 2 nears 600 pages and 300 of them could be removed because they don't make any difference in the overall storyline. Which proves my statement, this series needs editing, and I think ZA would be fantastic if they were published as 8-10 novellas.

I understand the appeal. I understand why people enjoy this series when you think of the main elements in the story. A Harry Potter on crack that slightly plagiarizes Winx Club at the same time. No one in their right mind would dislike these elements, they just have to be used correctly.

They've been in this school for god knows how long and they haven't learned a SINGLE THING. They haven't had a single class in the span of 1000 pages since book 1 that helps them control and develop their powers.

These girls were drowned, lied to, humiliated and they still kiss and f*ck some of them whenever they get the chance, which makes these females so unbelievably weak and hard to cheer for.

The only two satisfying developments are: the girls started fighting back and humiliating the boys a little bit and we have CRUMBS OF a teacher-student relationship (which is one of my favorite tropes so I am biased).

But none of their wishes/wants are clear here, these characters are all a mess, you can't tell most of them apart and it's not their fault. Like I said, this is like reading the first draft of a book. It's confusing, messy, repetitive, unnecessarily long, the characters lack motivation, personality and they don't follow any particular ARC for themselves. You will read 3 books and feel like you haven't experienced any real progress because these characters haven't been put through a gradual change.

I hate the slightly racist elements they play with when they talk about the Token Mexican kid - Diego. Stop, you don't need a token immigrant kid at your school to make fun of. That literally annoys the shit out of me. Which brings me back to my point: this series should be rewritten.

So yeah, the magic system is confusing and doesn't mean anything most of the time. The Harry Potter house points bullshit doesn't have any effect on them.

They forget to teach the girls stuff because they are too busy repeating useless information and going around in circles in most of the writing. And I can't bring myself to love any of these characters because the authors just seem to play with the idea of them but they don't know who they are, they didn't give them real personalities so most of their actions can't be explained because they mean nothing.

They change who they are and what they want constantly for the sake of shock and these characters are slaves to their plot, it should never be like that. It should be the other way around. Your plot should be a slave to your characters.

I also thought they were keeping people hostage because they end every book with a cliffhanger but the cliffhanger in this was underwhelming and I believe if people didn't DNF this series in ZA 1, they definitely DNF it here.

Anyways, I hate every single character but Orion. And these two stars only exist because of him.

Petition for ZA to be rewritten/edited by some good people.