If training under the Commandant’s lash, the Masks’ ruthlessness, and the life-or-death Trials at Blackcliff gripped you, you’ll be riveted by Rin’s ascent at Sinegard. Like Elias fighting his conditioning, Rin claws her way through a savage military school where brilliance means nothing without endurance—and where the real test begins once the academy ends.

You felt the weight of empire when Laia risked everything to free Darin and when Scholars navigated terror under Martial rule. In The Jasmine Throne, exiled princess Malini and servant-priestess Priya forge a fraught alliance inside a conquered city, pushing back against an occupying power with the same combustible mix of resistance, sacrifice, and risky trust that powered Laia’s infiltration.

If the Commandant’s punishments, the Augurs’ chilling manipulations, and Elias’s grim choices kept you turning pages, The Young Elites offers that same bleak edge. Adelina survives a world that rewards cruelty, much like Blackcliff, and her rise forces choices as morally thorny as Elias choosing between duty and conscience and Laia gambling lives for Darin.

If you loved how Laia’s slave-turned-spy arc at Blackcliff intersected with Elias’s internal rebellion and Helene’s loyalties, Six of Crows doubles down on that mosaic. Each member of Kaz’s crew brings a clear voice and motive to a high-stakes infiltration, echoing the tension of Laia slipping through the Commandant’s halls while Elias plans treason from within.

If the hidden bargains that put Elias into the Trials and the Commandant’s cold political calculus fascinated you, Baru’s intricate gambits will, too. Instead of knives in Blackcliff’s corridors, Baru wields ledgers and laws—subverting an empire from within with the same ruthless clarity that made every deal, betrayal, and prophecy in An Ember in the Ashes feel perilously loaded.