The Atlas Six
About the Book:
Author: Olivie Blake
Published: January 31st, 2020
Genre: Fantasy
Description:
The Alexandrian Society, caretakers of lost knowledge from the greatest civilizations of antiquity, are the foremost secret society of magical academicians in the world. Those who earn a place among the Alexandrians will secure a life of wealth, power, and prestige beyond their wildest dreams, and each decade, only the six most uniquely talented magicians are selected to be considered for initiation.
Enter the latest round of six: Libby Rhodes and Nico de Varona, unwilling halves of an unfathomable whole, who exert uncanny control over every element of physicality. Reina Mori, a naturalist, who can intuit the language of life itself. Parisa Kamali, a telepath who can traverse the depths of the subconscious, navigating worlds inside the human mind. Callum Nova, an empath easily mistaken for a manipulative illusionist, who can influence the intimate workings of a person’s inner self. Finally, there is Tristan Caine, who can see through illusions to a new structure of reality—an ability so rare that neither he nor his peers can fully grasp its implications.
When the candidates are recruited by the mysterious Atlas Blakely, they are told they will have one year to qualify for initiation, during which time they will be permitted preliminary access to the Society’s archives and judged based on their contributions to various subjects of impossibility: time and space, luck and thought, life and death. Five, they are told, will be initiated. One will be eliminated. The six potential initiates will fight to survive the next year of their lives, and if they can prove themselves to be the best among their rivals, most of them will.
Rating: 2.5
Trigger Warnings: suicide, reference to a past teen/adult sexual relationship(events of said relationship are mentioned not described), mention of rape(past - Callum says he was “conceived under less than admirable circumstances)
Tropes: dark academia, magic school
Review:
So this book starts of slow, there’s no denying that. Literally nothing happens in the first 100 pages, it’s incredibly boring. All that happens is the cast of characters get introduced to the reader. Even midway through once the good stuff starts to happen and the story begins to roll it still took me at least a chapter to settle in every time I picked it up to read. Additionally, the parts in the middle that were exciting were few and far between. Past the second half and into the third to final sections of the book luckily it does pick up a bit more, particularly in terms of relationship drama which I loved!
This story is dark. It has quite a few moments that are a bit of a shock to the system. Each of these moments however, does further the character development and the development of the plot overall. Further, this really is a character based story, meaning there is much more character development than there is plot. This in some cases can be great but in this book is a bit much. It felt like the premise of the story was interesting but in the end it had little plot(especially in the first half of the book). Though the last half is interesting I found it didn’t make up for how boring the first half was.
Lastly, the use of flowery language is overwhelming. When you’re reading this book it feels like the author is using the thesaurus just to confuse you instead of to add to the story. Overall, not a huge fan of this book even if I enjoyed the final section.
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