Origins of the Six

Books Included: Academy of Six, Control of Five, Destruction of Two, and Wrath of One
Series Status: Complete
Ending: HEA
Spice: Explicit and open-door

Content & Trigger Warnings: Explicit sexual content, violence, blood and gore, death, murder, captivity and imprisonment, torture, abuse, parental abuse, manipulation, discrimination, bullying, trauma, war and battle violence, demons, religious and Heaven/Hell themes, and darker supernatural themes.

When Ashley suggested The Origins of the Six to me, she mentioned that it was one of her spiciest series. Apparently, she knew exactly what to say to make my ears perk up. 😂 Of course, I immediately pointed out that To Tame a Shifter was already pretty damn spicy. Her response? “Origins is spicier.” At that point, she definitely had my attention.

I’m a Kindle reader through and through. I actually prefer reading digitally, so I don’t buy physical copies of books just because I enjoyed them. The books that earn permanent space on my shelves are all signed and come from authors I absolutely love. They’re the ones whose stories I know I’ll happily read another dozen times and whose work I want to support beyond simply buying the ebook. So the fact that I already had many of Ashley’s signed books taking up a considerable amount of real estate on my shelves tells you more about what I think of her writing than anything else I could say.

Then Ashley mailed me the boxset. Now, I had a personal recommendation from an author whose signed books had already earned considerable real estate on my shelves, a boxset signed by both her and co-author Aleera Anaya Ceres sitting in front of me, and Ashley’s promise that it was going to be even spicier. Obviously, I had to find out whether she was right. What can I say? I’m obsessed, and I still haven’t found a book of hers I didn’t like…yet. 😂

The Origins of the Six contains Academy of Six, Control of Five, Destruction of Two, and Wrath of One, with all four books following Izara Castillo through one continuous story. Izara arrives at the Academy of Six with one particularly inconvenient problem: nobody knows what the hell she is. Not Izara, not the people running the academy, and certainly not the supernatural classification system that would very much appreciate everyone fitting neatly into their designated little box. She is essentially supernatural paperwork’s worst nightmare.

The Academy of Six is supposed to help Prodigiums, or Prods, who struggle to control their supernatural abilities. In reality, these are the supernatural world’s troubled kids, dangerous cases, rejects, and people who don’t fit comfortably into everyone else’s expectations. So Ashley and Aleera basically handed me an academy full of supernatural misfits, introduced me to a sarcastic heroine nobody can identify, surrounded her with secrets, danger, questionable authority figures, and powers nobody fully understands, and apparently expected me not to become curious. That was never going to happen.

Izara was an easy character for me to get invested in because she is sarcastic, defensive, stubborn, reckless, vulnerable, and carrying considerably more fear than she wants anyone to see. Her humor often works like armor, and underneath all that attitude is someone desperately trying to understand why she is different and whether whatever exists inside her makes her dangerous. The mystery surrounding her identity gave me something to chase from the beginning, but discovering what she is isn’t simply about waiting for some shiny new supernatural ability to appear so everyone can gasp and declare her the most powerful special snowflake in existence. Her powers raise uncomfortable questions about where she came from, what she might be capable of, and whether the darker pieces of herself determine the person she has to become.

That was where Izara became considerably more interesting to me. She doesn’t fit comfortably into good or evil, and neither does the world surrounding her. Species, bloodline, power, and origin don’t automatically determine whether someone is good, and Izara has to decide what she is going to do with what she has been given. Sometimes she handles that responsibility beautifully, and other times fear, anger, desperation, and misplaced trust send her charging directly toward decisions that had me staring at the page wondering whether we had perhaps considered literally any of the other available options. Apparently not. Fine. Carry on. My own qualifications for judging questionable decisions are shaky at best anyway.

Then I met Malek, Saint, Syko, and Phoenix, and suddenly I understood a little more of why Ashley thought this series belonged in my hands. 😂 We have a werewolf, a vampire, a nephilim, and an incubus, and the variety immediately got my attention. I love supernatural characters, but what really worked for me was that Ashley and Aleera didn’t simply change the species, hair color, and preferred method of brooding and call it character development. These men actually feel different. Their supernatural natures influence their instincts, personalities, vulnerabilities, needs, and relationships with Izara, and each connection develops its own identity.

Malek brings that intense, possessive werewolf energy, but there is more underneath that dominance than growling “mine” and expecting me to applaud. His wolf, his past, his need for control, and what he has endured all influence the harder edges of his personality and the way he connects with Izara. He has that intensity I expect from a possessive supernatural character, but understanding where some of it comes from gives him considerably more depth than simply being the dominant werewolf of the group.

Saint, our vampire, understands the importance of inappropriate commentary during a crisis, so obviously we were going to get along just fine. He brings humor and flirtation into the group, but there is plenty hiding behind the sarcasm. His family, insecurities, and vulnerabilities gradually reveal someone more complicated than the personality he initially presents. I have a weakness for characters who can make me laugh while concealing an entire storage unit of emotional baggage behind the jokes, so naturally Saint worked for me.

Syko, the nephilim, brings a gentler quality to his relationship with Izara, but gentler certainly doesn’t mean uncomplicated. He carries his own guilt, darkness, family problems, and painful history, and I liked the balance he brought to some of the stronger personalities surrounding her. He was also a reminder that the person who seems safest or most controlled can still be carrying some of the heaviest shit underneath the surface.

Then there is Phoenix, the incubus, and watching a man who understands lust considerably better than genuine emotional attachment suddenly develop actual feelings was entertaining as hell. His early reaction to emotional intimacy could basically be summarized as, “What the fuck is this feeling, and how do I make it stop?” Sex and desire are an unavoidable part of Phoenix’s nature, but that actually makes his emotional development more interesting. Lust is something he understands. Genuine attachment is considerably more troublesome, especially when those pesky feelings refuse to follow the convenient rules he already knows.

Somewhere around here, I realized Ashley had gotten me again. One thing I’ve really come to appreciate about her books is the way she writes polyamorous relationships, and this series helped me understand exactly why that dynamic works so well for me when it is done right. I don’t simply want an FMC surrounded by attractive men. Adding another penis to the room is not character development. 😂 I want each relationship to have its own chemistry, conflicts, vulnerabilities, and reasons for existing, because otherwise I’m eventually going to start identifying the men by hair color and whichever one happens to be naked at the time.

What really sold me on Izara, Malek, Saint, Syko, and Phoenix was watching those individual relationships gradually stop feeling separate. They argue, compete, get jealous, protect one another, irritate the absolute hell out of each other, and develop connections that exist outside of Izara. Eventually, I wasn’t just invested in who she was becoming or how each romance would develop. I was invested in them, because the best found families aren’t made of perfect people—they’re beautifully damaged disasters who somehow find exactly what they were missing in each other. And honestly, that describes this group pretty damn well.

Apparently, polyamorous supernatural chaos has become one of my favorite relationship dynamics to read. Give me complicated people with different personalities, needs, damage, and emotional baggage who somehow figure out how all their weird little pieces fit together, and apparently I’m happy. Who knew? Well…Ashley, apparently. 😂 Clearly, the woman knows my reading habits a little too well.

Fortunately, figuring out their complicated relationship situation is nowhere near the biggest problem these people have. What begins as a supernatural academy mystery surrounding a girl nobody can identify gradually grows into something much larger. The history and true purpose of the academy become more important, secrets surrounding its founding supernatural bloodlines begin surfacing, corruption becomes harder to ignore, and questions about Izara’s origins eventually pull angels, demons, Heaven, Hell, family secrets, and supernatural conflict into the equation. Basically, things escalate spectacularly.

The Academy of Six itself ended up being one of the more interesting parts of the story for me because the idea behind it is actually admirable. It is supposed to give lost, dangerous, and struggling supernatural kids somewhere to learn what they are and gain control over abilities they may not understand. The problem is what happens when the people entrusted with helping those kids become more afraid of what they might become than concerned with who they actually are.

Izara exposes that hypocrisy beautifully because nobody can put a convenient label on her. The unknown makes her frightening to some of the very people who are supposed to help her understand herself, and that creates one of the more interesting questions underneath all the supernatural chaos: should someone be judged by what they are capable of doing, or by what they actually choose to do? To be completely fair, Izara occasionally provides some fairly compelling evidence for the “possibly dangerous” side of that debate, but perhaps we could try education before execution. I’m just throwing ideas around here.

The mythology becomes increasingly important as the series progresses, particularly once the Heaven-and-Hell elements begin connecting to the truth surrounding Izara. I liked that the story doesn’t reduce those ideas to the simplest possible version of one side being inherently good and the other automatically evil. Izara has pieces of herself that seemingly shouldn’t coexist, and her journey becomes less about deciding which half deserves to survive and more about determining what kind of person she chooses to become with all of it.

That theme also fits surprisingly well with the Academy itself. This is a story full of characters who have been judged, rejected, feared, controlled, hurt, or defined by things they didn’t necessarily choose. Their pasts influence them, sometimes heavily, but their damage never has to become their entire identity. And these people have damage. So much damn damage. Their coping mechanisms occasionally have roughly the same long-term effectiveness as covering a check-engine light with duct tape and declaring the car fixed, but that emotional baggage gives the relationships more weight. They don’t magically become well-adjusted because they found people who love them. They still screw up, hurt one another, make bad decisions, and carry guilt, fear, anger, and histories they can’t simply erase. They just stop carrying all of it alone.

And yes, before anyone asks, this series is spicy. We have an incubus in the relationship, so nobody should be particularly shocked by this development. 😂 The sex is explicit and plentiful enough to earn 4.5/5 🌶️ peppers from me, but what kept me invested was everything happening when everybody managed to put their clothes back on. The attraction works because there are actual relationships underneath it. I cared about the jealousy, trust, vulnerability, protectiveness, friendships, and emotional connections just as much as the chemistry.

The humor also deserves credit for keeping the series fun as everything around the characters becomes increasingly dark. There is violence, trauma, abuse, captivity, death, family dysfunction, demons, supernatural politics, and eventually war, yet these people still manage to insult each other and make wildly inappropriate comments at spectacularly inappropriate times. Thank God for that, because if you’re going to emotionally traumatize everybody, unleash demons, threaten the world, and leave me questioning whether my favorites are going to survive, somebody better still be capable of making an inappropriate joke. Apparently this is one of my reading requirements now. I have standards.

The later books also expand beyond Izara’s perspective, and getting inside Malek, Saint, Syko, and Phoenix’s heads added another layer to the story for me. Seeing their fears, histories, motivations, and feelings directly helped me understand their relationships with Izara and with each other differently. It also confirmed something I had already suspected: absolutely nobody in this group is as emotionally well-adjusted as they would probably like to believe. Shocking, I know.

Now, Ashley may have known this series was right up my alley, but she wasn’t getting that last half star simply because she predicted my reading taste with mildly alarming accuracy. My biggest issue is that there are places where the story moves fast. Once the mythology, Academy history, Heaven, Hell, supernatural politics, family histories, individual character arcs, romance, and larger conflict all start competing for page space, some important moments don’t get quite as much room as I wanted them to have.

I would have happily spent more time digging into certain pieces of the mythology, the Academy’s history, and the emotional fallout from some of the bigger revelations. There were moments that deserved a little more time to settle before the story was already dragging me toward the next problem. Occasionally, I also needed everyone to put their hormones in a drawer for five damn minutes because I had questions. Important questions. Potentially world-ending questions. Surely the horny supernatural people could wait long enough for me to get some answers. Probably.

That is ultimately where the missing half star went. It wasn’t because I stopped caring or because the story lost me. Quite the opposite. I wanted more from certain parts because the ideas had already gotten my attention. When my biggest complaint is essentially “you gave me something interesting and I wanted you to let me dig around in it longer,” the series clearly did quite a bit right.

By the final book, what started as one girl trying to understand what the hell she is has expanded far beyond that original mystery, but I liked where the story eventually brings us. Beneath the supernatural species, romance, mythology, and chaos is the idea that the lost, damaged, powerful, and misunderstood deserve somewhere they can figure out who they are without automatically being treated as disposable because someone else is afraid of what they might become. For all the demons, danger, sex, questionable decisions, and supernatural insanity happening around it, there is a surprising amount of heart underneath this story.

So, was Ashley right when she recommended The Origins of the Six to me and promised it was going to be even spicier? Abso-freakin-lutely.

This series gets 4.5/5 ⭐ stars from me because I cared about these characters, wanted answers to the mysteries, loved the variety within the relationships, became invested in this beautifully damaged little found family, and genuinely enjoyed watching a supernatural academy story expand into something much bigger than I initially expected. The missing half star belongs to the places where I wanted the story to slow down, dig deeper, and let some of its strongest ideas and emotional moments breathe.

If you’re looking for an adult supernatural academy series with a sarcastic FMC, a mystery surrounding her identity, a werewolf, vampire, nephilim, and incubus who actually have distinct personalities, polyamorous and why-choose relationships with emotional substance, found family, damaged characters, angels and demons, Heaven-and-Hell mythology, explicit spice, dark humor, and enough supernatural chaos to make responsible decision-making seem like an unreasonable request, The Origins of the Six absolutely deserves a spot on your TBR.

If you prefer closed-door romance, aren’t into why choose or polyamorous relationships, dislike multiple POVs, want extremely dense and methodical worldbuilding, or need your fictional characters to communicate responsibly and carefully consider the consequences of their actions before doing something spectacularly stupid, you may want to proceed with caution. Personally, I had a damn good time with this entire supernatural mess, and I can absolutely see why Ashley thought this series would work for me.

She handed me supernatural misfits, a mystery I needed answers to, four completely different supernatural men, polyamorous chaos, morally complicated mythology, inappropriate humor, and a found family made out of beautifully damaged disasters. Apparently, she knew exactly what she was doing.

Thank you, Ashley. You were right. It is a little spicier, and I loved it. 😂🖤📚

—Mz. Sassy K.
SassyReviews.com

NOTE: As always, all thoughts, reactions, fangirling, suspicious side-eyeing, and sleep-deprived ramblings are entirely my own. My reviews are always unbiased, unfiltered, and unapologetically honest—whether I loved the book, wanted to throw my Kindle across the room, or somehow managed to do both.