Summaries!
Book Recaps
Spoiler full recaps of the books for ARC readers needing a brushup.
Book 1
At her mom’s funeral, Fiz gets kidnapped by her estranged aunt and uncle on her mom’s side. She escapes, pulls off the summon familiar spell, which is the required entry ticket to Order Academy, the magical college she’s desperate to attend. She hopes it will help her learn about her long-lost dad from the Magic Realm, who was basically a wizarding rockstar. Then her uncle tracks her down and tries to murder her. Enter Dominic, a smoking-hot fae who shows up and proceeds to just stand there and watch while Fiz fights for her life. (Spoiler: she wins, and it is gruesome.) Dominic then bullies her into binding him as her familiar, but the spell goes sideways. His response? A shrug and a “Tough luck, enjoy jail for life,” before he bounces.
At the school admissions interview, Tabitha decides to let Fiz in because she seems packed with magical power. Four other women from the interview make it too: Olivia, who is kind of mean, Claudia, whose sister went to the school and vanished, So-young, and Tecuani.
Fiz is all jazzed, heads to the Magic Realm, and promptly meets a phoenix that leaves a mark on her face.
But the school is nothing like what she imagined. She is slapped with the label of “mundane human,” which basically means slave status and totally disposable. The “Proper Students” are the ones born in the Magic Realm and conveniently not human. That is how she meets Valerie, a so-called proper student who enjoys torturing her with magic and is way too obsessed with Dominic.
Even worse, Fiz gets assigned to take care of five super-hot fae asshats, otherwise known as The Kings: Dominic, Galeron, Caldor, Liam, and Dravec. She has to live in their house and deal with them being all hot and strutting around dripping wet in towels. Totally the worst.
The sexy asshats drag her into a magical Dungeon, which is basically a monster factory designed to kill adventurers and used as training by the “proper students.” Things go sideways fast when Caldor gets snatched by the Dungeon and the others ditch Fiz inside with no way out. She runs into some monsters, scores a really cute magical backpack, and then the sexy asshats finally come back to rescue her… only to catch her in full badass mode.
Meanwhile, she starts having erratic dreams about the Chaos God, who looks suspiciously like her dad. The first time she meets him he is all like Fiz, I am your father. But after that he insists, over and over, that he is not. Her real dad, however, did leave her a dimensional house that can attach to any doorway, so she hooks that up and stops having to live in a closet.
The sexy asshats, naturally, think her dimensional house is extremely cool.
Some sexy and chaotic things go down, and Fiz picks up a couple of new friends: Amabella and Yvonnel, both “proper students” who seem convinced she’s something special… because of rocks. She learns more about the school, like its ridiculously strict dress code and the fact that she got assigned the wrong clothes. In class, she meets another friend, Alex.
Unfortunately, every time Fiz tries magic it blows up in her face, literally and extravagantly, leaving her feeling like a flop. To make matters worse, someone swipes her underwear. At least Yvonnel and Amabella team up with her to terrify Greg, a not-sexy jerk from class. Oh, and So-young vanishes.
On the bright side, Galeron and Fiz share a surprisingly sweet moment when he helps her break into her evil aunt’s house to steal back her mom’s ashes. That leads to another moment, this one very sexy and very out of control.
And then comes the big reveal: Galeron is an Incubus. He can shift into a demon form, make everyone in the vicinity hot and bothered, and feed off sexual magical energy while literally draining people to death. Every “proper student” has some form of monster magic locked away by the Bond the Order Goddess slapped on their kind, and the fact that Galeron’s Incubus powers are breaking through means the Bond is starting to crack.
Fiz learns that a phoenix kiss, the one she got when the phoenix touched her on her first day, means she can resurrect one person. She is thrilled and rushes to get her mom’s ashes, which are required for the resurrection, only to find they are missing. Then it is game time: Kings versus Princes. Things happen, and the sexy asshats lock her in a locker.
She breaks out, but Olivia lures her to a secluded spot where Valerie tries to kill her. Valerie has figured out that Fiz’s familiar spell did not just misfire. It magically married Fiz and Dominic. Dominic, by the way, has known this the entire time. Valerie fails spectacularly, and Fiz stuffs her into her magical backpack.
When Fiz rushes back to the Kings’ pad, she finds out they were the ones who stole her mom’s ashes. The sentient Dungeon had demanded them as payment to get Caldor back. They succeed in rescuing him, and Fiz loses her chance to resurrect her mom.
Fiz is, understandably, very upset.
Her wonky magic goes boom, which attracts the Dungeon. It digs a tunnel straight to her and unleashes a massive monster fight. Fiz proves she has the Kings back and vice versa. The headmistress Tabitha shows up and Fiz is arrested. Not for dangerous, uncontrolled magic that goes boom, but for the crime of pretending to be a guy. Which, for the record, she was not doing at all. Everyone just assumed it because of the uniform she got stuck with at admissions.
Book one closes with Fiz in prison, waiting to find out what the Goddess of Order is going to do with her.
Book 2
Fiz is in jail, but the Order Goddess, or something inside her, has Fiz’s back. Despite all the Chaos that surrounds her, she keeps getting those get out of jail free cards that are going to expire when she least expects it.
But she isn’t completely off the hook, she still has to get through magical college with Dominic, who it turns out that she accidentally fae married. Now that she is aware that they are married, he acts a bit different, and starts being nicer instead of being his usual jerk self.
Fiz goes to class, gets beat up by her gym teacher Sibyl, does some training in the Dungeon, and discovers that there is a room in the Dungeon that looks like the mural on her bedroom
wall. Not much time to think about the importance of that though because the inlaws show up.
Dominic’s mom drugs her (because the school apparently uses mundane labor to run a massive drug production lab to create a substance out of unicorn poop), and Fiz goes on a wild drug trip where she talks to a lot of different people, does a lot of things, learns some things that are important for the plot and will make you happy on a re-read, and gets involved in the Blood Moon with a pack of lycans chasing after her.
Tabitha kills Alex because she is an evil nazi vampire.
The lycans get a hold of Fiz. She wakes up in a place she isn’t supposed to be.
Book 3 begins.
Book 3
Fiz is freaked out waking up with a naked Liam on the floor, but after a bit of uncomfortable investigation, she realizes no hanky panky happened between the two of them, a fact that deeply confuses Liam. It turns out, one of the effects of glitter is delayed memory recollection, so she’ll get those memories back, just not immediately, which is concerning because clearly a lot went on.
She does remember Alex being killed, but his brain and heart weren’t damaged, so he could have been revived right after, but was he? Nope. His body vanished. The Kings assumed his corpse was dumped in the Dungeon because that's what the school does with corpses.But there isn’t time to dwell on that because the Seelie head honcho, Valerie’s dad and Dominic’s uncle, is in the school and he has Valerie’s femur, which means he can see her last moments.
Luckily for Fiz, those last moments aren’t super clear on who killed her, but that doesn’t matter. She is taken for questioning, but is her usual self and mouths off. The white eyed entity interrupts a tense moment to keep her from being killed, and the Ard Ri assumes what interrupted them was the Goddess, who did in fact order that she be brought to her. Tldr of that whole thing is now Fiz has to fight Valerie’s younger sister in a fight to the death, which obviously sucks, as Fiz doesn’t know how to use her magic and the younger sister has been training her whole life.
Training montage time!
Jk, well sort of. Fiz makes it to a few classes, learns more about the order magic system and the fact that she simply can’t do order magic, which leads to more conversations with her not dad, Balor. Also Caldor’s been living in her house. He asks her to try to heal his wings, as guess what, they were cut off because he is technically a political prisoner. She succeeds and he pledges himself to her, which weirds her out.
Fiz attends a practice battle to understand what she’ll be doing in the challenge, goes to visit the Goddess a few times because even though everyone is all like no she’s evil, Fiz is currently a sassbucket who is missing a sense of fear that would stop most people from mouthing off or doing dumb things like trying to make friends with a literal deity. She also gets a hold of video of the blood moon and finds out that Dominic shifted into a dragon because she ordered him to. He ate Tabitha. This is quite a shock to the school as dragon shifters are never unbound because they are too dangers. The fact that Fiz can break those bindings temporarily is a big deal the Kings keep hidden. It is helpful to the whole school being upset thing that Dominic is technically royalty and they exist in a class based system.
So, Fiz is now fully aware of how much power she has over Dominic because of the bond they formed in book 1, and now that she is aware of that, the book goes full spice. It is both fun and unsettling for Fiz, and she is emotionally conflicted about it.
More training in the Dungeon, Liam tries to introduce her to his pack which she doesn’t like, especially because he shows off the violent side of himself. The fish hatchery and the missing women keeps coming up but that side quest doesn’t get addressed just yet. She finally gets around to summoning a familiar and it is not what she expected.
The Seelie douchebag kills Zassle at a school assembly, specifically for helping Fiz out, finally cluing Fiz into why Orientation is so terrible, as it is is the same thing that happens there.
More failed training at order magic, more sex, and then guess what, the Seelie Head Honcho isn’t going to play fair! He kidnaps her, takes her to a prison built into the wall (lots of prisons in this place) and breaks her leg with the intention of dumping her into the challenge fight in that state. He found Olivia in the mundane and she is in the prison too. Well Fiz’s indomitable sassyness is good for something and she breaks them free, gives her self a new leg, finds another seal for the Dungeon at the bottom of the prison, and when she breaks that a whole bunch of Orc warriors (one of which thinks Olivia is cute) emerge and go fuck shit up. Fiz gets Olivia situated with the rest of the Orcs in the dungeon then heads back into the school wall because like hell she is going to leave an enemy alive. She is intercepted by the fairy hive that lives in the wall and realizes she needs to spend more time thinking about what she wants out of all of this rather than reacting to everything.
She ditches everyone to go back to the mundane, do some introspection time, and hang out with her Aunt Alice. She decides she wants to go back and fight, not just for her friends, but because she feels bad for the Goddess in the cage. (come on girl, isn’t that goddess a homicidal maniac?) Aunt Alice hands her a gun because why not and off she goes.
Fiz fights the challenge, and instead of trying to use the control system of order magic, leans into the chaos, resulting in a battle where her magic forms whatever impulse that forms in her head, which is not always helpful. She wins.
The Seelie Doucheknuckle is upset about this, as he just got his other kid killed, and Fiz demands they let the Goddess settle it, to which he agrees. Then the evil voice in her head speaks to her in front of the Goddess, which causes an extreme emotional reaction from the Goddess. The Seelie Ard Ri takes that moment to try to kill Fiz, and the now white eyed Goddess saves her. Fiz pushes the Seelie Ard Ri into the bubble (which burns him) and the Goddess finishes the job, killing him.
Fiz, so full of herself and the fact that she clearly is the special chosen one of specialness, steps through the bubble that no one else can cross, and tries to make a connection with the Goddess, to convince her to change her ways.
The Goddess rips out Fiz’s heart and she dies.
On to book 4!