Babster98's Reviews > The Atlas Six

** spoiler alert ** If this could be zero stars it would be. This book reeks of pretentiousness and a superiority complex. This is a book that has zero understanding about how to make characters or a plot compelling. I mean, plot is a very generous word, what happened in this book? Almost nothing. The book is about the characters right? Alright lets get to them:

The characters are 6 insufferable or boring people who do nothing but argue and judge each other for 300+ pages and experience no character growth. None of these characters were even slightly compelling, nor were they believable (No one actually talks like that Olivie). They were also incredibly stupid for being shocked at the fact that the illuminati was asking them to kill someone. I can’t say that their decisions made no sense because they all had so little personality besides being insufferable and boring that I believed they might as well do anything the author dictated. I felt nothing over their supposed anguish over having to kill someone or having to pick someone to kill because all of them were, at best, lukewarm about each other and, at worst, hated each other. I found myself wishing they all just died instead of just one.

The society itself is the most weakly constructed setting I’ve ever read both plot wise and description wise. I got no sense of the exclusivity of intellectual nature of this group. All their groundbreaking research was brushed over as if nothing happened yet the reader was expected to act as if these were earth shattering developments. Scenes written within the society were written and treated no differently than scenes in the mundane world, which made the society itself feel boring and unimportant. The larger world was also terribly developed. So there’s magicians living alongside humans and this doesn’t influence history? All the same countries and politics that exist in our non magic world exist in their magic one?? How can that be? Have magicians never influenced the outcome of any war? Any social development? Anything to make their world different from ours?

The magic system itself was pathetically underdeveloped. Magic might as well do anything and everything in this world and that made every slightly deadly situation feel boring because they were just going to magic ex machina their situation. Almost none of the rules of magic were properly explained to the audience.

This book also tried to make numerous social justice points that almost all fell flat. Saying “men are trash” once every 50 pages isn’t feminism Olivie. This book seems to flip flop between acting like the society’s exclusivity is a good thing or a bad thing and all possible messages are muddled and lost in pretentious writing. If the point is that this sort of elitism is wrong then why are the characters mostly (positively) defined by how remarkable they are compared to others? Why are famous historical figures retconned to be medeians as if they could only be remarkable if they were born with magic?

Smaller point: Nico is supposed to be from a rich Cuban family, not that he has Cuban ancestry, but that his family is currently situated in Cuba. Unless they’re friends of the Castro’s or the revolution never happened in this timeline, I highly doubt there’s a rich, capitalist investing family located in Cuba. Maybe Olivie Blake sees all latin american countries as interchangeable.

This book was an insufferable, pretentious, boring, mind numbing, unfocused, disaster. I found myself wishing i could just throw it on to the street to stop reading it if I hadn’t paid full price for it. Read Six of Crows instead.

Edit: Comment informed me that the author’s name is Olivie, I misspelled it as “Olivia” so I had to edit that.