Review: The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake
It has been awhile since I read this book and I am now writing my review based on what I remember and on the notes I wrote while I was reading it!
The prologue was so incredibly terrible that if I was not reading this book for a book club I would not have gotten past the first page. The language is so dense and so incredibly faux intellectual as to be almost unintelligible. I read the first paragraph to three people who all just looked at me with uncomprehending eyes and laughed. It is truly bad writing. Fortunately the writing does improve after this.
This is a really character focused fantasy. We spend the first third of the novel doing essentially home visits with different characters as we are introduced to each person and the world the book will inhabit. It really has an open house before the first day of school feeling, which is apt as they are essentially being recruited for magical graduate school and once they are in magical graduate school the plot really starts to focus a bit more. Though there are very important clues to the end of the book in the first section of the novel.
Nico and Libby do sort of occupy the same place in the story in a way that experienced readers will note is a clue to something else coming. The two are starting so closely paired because there needs to be a big even that will differentiate them at some point. I am not sure the book really used either of these two to their full extent, but I do think that was a running problem as this cast was a little bit too big for the page count and skill level of the author. But I did enjoy Nico and Libby as characters and the fact that they were so similar did help in me not getting confused in their storylines.
I am writing this about five months after I read the book and all I have written about Callum and Tristan was that I kept getting the two of them confused with each other. I currently cannot remember if anyone died, I don't think anyone did? But absolutely this story would have benefited from the emotional turmoil of a death and the narrowing of the cast. Though I still think these two were underdeveloped generally.
Reina was my early favorite. She gets such a bad ass set up and then is barely in the rest of the book. She is so underutilized it is almost comical. I thought she was the most interesting and engaging of the lot and she just sort of pops in every hundred pages. It was absolutely the most disappointing part of the book for me because I think she could have been so interesting to read from more often.
With Perisa I really liked the tension in trying to figure out her motives throughout the story. I do not remember too many other strong feelings about her expect that she got a lot more page time than I originally expected. I might come in later and expand my thoughts about Perisa and Atlas and Ezra but I need to locate more in depth notes to properly do this.
About the plot I was pretty happy that I was able to predict the big twist. I do think the telegraphing is pretty apparent in the first section of the book, and as the book progresses it talks more and more about secret hiding places and pathways and time. I like to have guessed correctly and was surprised enough by other aspects of the story that I wasn't disappointed to have seen the twist coming.
The magic system was another area where I felt like it was underdeveloped. Even though I felt like this needed more page time in the story I did think the magic system was really fun and I genuinely enjoyed it.
I did find this book a touch pretentious throughout. This coupled with the way the book also talks down to the reader with its references was confusing. It was pretentious enough to use slightly obscure references, but then Blake would explain the reference to the reader in a way that did feel a bit condescending. It is not very often that a book chooses to do those two things together. Be pretentious or use more widely known references, I hated the trying to have your cake and eat it too feeling this gave me.
A similar issue was that Blake uses a lot of half baked metaphor in the book. It was a weird feeling to read and think that the author was not really understanding the metaphors she was actively using throughout the book. I do hope this is something that would have been addressed between this edition the the traditionally published edition. But while I was reading I just kept feelin like what Black was saying and what she meant by a metaphor were not aligned.
I didn't hate this book, I did generally enjoy reading it and I always like the opportunity to be able to engage with people over a popular novel, but I just thought so much in this book was underdeveloped. I might read book two and see how I like Blake's writing as she grows in her writing career.
I gave this book three stars.
