The Atlas Six
Olivie Blake
Overall: 3/5
Plot and themes: 4/5
Characters: 2/5
Writing style: 3/5
Attention-grabbing: 4/5
The Atlas Six is a kind of combo sci-fi urban fantasy combo that follows the journeys of six individuals trying to become magical scholars of the lost Library of Alexandria. The six who are selected to train for this prestigious honor are driven to the very edge of their magical capabilities, even considering they are recruited as the six most talented magicians of their time from the start. But there's a catch, only five of the recruits are actually going to make it to initiation and there's something much more sinister than pure academics driving the process.
I thought that this book had a lot of potential in how absolutely trippy and convoluted the magic was. There was so much going on all the time and honestly it made me lightheaded trying to keep track of it all. The differences in their powers were balanced and gave a lot of insight into the differences between perceived and actual strengths. And the way that their backstories and the discovery of their magics were revealed gave us a lot of intriguing hints at the functionality of the world that they live in. Which is far from just your normal magic-featuring urban fantasy as it also features some kind of abstract cataclysmic fall of the life as we currently know it.
The magic was the highlight, the characters were the major problem. I wasn't tied to any of them and they were way too spaced out for me to get a good read on any of them. We get to see them through an entire year of education and growth and yet I didn't see any real growth. And any real character traits that I thought I understood about them were completely debunked by random things that kept cropping up. I understand that some people are a lot more capable of keeping track of such diverging plot lines than I am, so I don't think it's probably universally bad, I just think it lost track of a lot of the central progression.
So it's enjoyable but I'm very thrown off by the pacing. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a duology, though I could be wrong, and I have no idea how that'll pan out as I feel like we haven't been given a lot of insight into why things are the way they are. The only things we do know that completely and totally push the plot forward were given to us in twenty pages of info dump. It's great if you love a gritty magic that requires you to reread it several times over to understand it and you're not really all that particular about getting attached to the characters, but a little hard to love if you favor characters more than plot.
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