Empire High Books in Order

Empire High begins as a rich-kids, private-school romance and then grows into something much bigger. Brooklyn is the outsider, a small-town girl suddenly pulled into Manhattan's most elite circles. Matt Caldwell is the untouchable golden boy at the center of that world. Their connection is immediate, but so are the class barriers, the cruelty, and the sense that everything around them comes with strings attached.

The first part of the series is all about pressure.

Brooklyn is not only trying to survive a new school. She is trying to survive a new life. The money is blinding, the social rules are vicious, and the families involved have the kind of power that can make even ordinary teenage mistakes feel dangerous. Matt, meanwhile, is not just a love interest. He is a product of that world, even when he hates parts of it. That tension gives the early books their edge. They are not simple wish-fulfillment stories about dating a rich boy. They are about what it costs to be pulled inside a system built to protect itself.

Then the series makes a smart pivot. After the high school arc in Untouchable, Elite, and Betrayal, the later books jump ahead and revisit Matt and Brooklyn as adults. That is where Matchmaker, Runaway, Homecoming, Exposed, and Forever take the story from youthful intensity into second-chance territory. Old love is still there, but now it has years of damage, absence, grief, and unfinished business hanging over it.

That time jump is the hook.

It lets the series keep the heightened drama of the school books while adding adult consequences. Wealth still matters. Family secrets still matter. So do memory, survival, and the question of whether first love can survive what time has done to both people. The series also overlaps with Smoak's wider connected universe, so longtime readers get extra payoff from seeing familiar names drift in and out.

In tone, this is one of Smoak's most melodramatic series, and that is part of the appeal. It likes penthouses, confrontations, painful misunderstandings, vicious social games, and big emotional reveals. But beneath all of that spectacle, it is really about Brooklyn trying to hold onto herself in a world that keeps telling her who she should be.

If you want an Ivy Smoak series with money, glamour, bullying, longing, and years of unfinished love, Empire High is a very easy place to get hooked.