If your experience of astrology is doom-scrolling some account telling you your weekend is ruined because of a planet, Steven Forrest is the antidote.
He's one of the leading voices of what's called evolutionary astrology, and his whole thing is free will. He's almost militant about it. To Forrest, your chart is not a script. It's not fate. It's a map of your tendencies and the specific stuff you're here to work on, and what you do with it is completely up to you.
His key idea is that every placement has a high road and a low road. Same raw energy, two very different ways to live it out. A placement that can show up as crippling anxiety can also show up as deep sensitivity and insight. It's the same wiring, and you get a say in which version you grow into.
His book The Inner Sky is the one people hand you when you actually want to learn this stuff instead of just reading memes about it, because he teaches it as a tool for self-understanding, not prediction.
He does fold in the idea of the soul evolving across lifetimes if you're into that. But here's the thing, you don't have to be. Strip all the metaphysics out and what's left still holds up: you have patterns, you have growth edges, and you are not doomed by any of them. That's worth hearing in any language.