My Rating: 3.25 out of 5 stars
This is such a hyped book and I think my enjoyment of it fell because of it. This is my first experience of the new trendy, “dark academia” books that are blowing up on the internet. If someone mentions popular dark academia books, you’ll probably hear this book’s name alongside: Ninth House, If We Were Villains, or The Secret History. From what I’ve heard from other people’s reviews on this book, “Atlas Six” is meant to be a dark academia book with an unforgettable cast of characters, an amazing and atmospheric setting, as well as all the dark academia vibes such as sketchy classes and amoral characters studying probably amoral material to do amoral things.
I personally feel like this book only achieved a select few of what I’ve listed but fell flat in most other aspects.
Let’s start off with the good.
The characters were unlike any other character I’ve read about before. They were most definitely amoral characters who’s motivations, aspirations, and intent are all cloudy and not so clear for readers. I feel like it has the level of obscurity that I believe dark academia flourishes in. As mysterious as these characters are, the author does a great job diving deep into some of their dilemmas and lays out a foundation that you can get hooked onto. I feel like all author’s go into the intent of writing a book with an unforgettable, truly unique cast of characters that readers will get hooked onto. Many authors attempt this but not many are successful with it. Olivie Blake was successful.
The powers and abilities these characters had were pretty cool. I think that the school setting and the whole act of learning about one’s powers and researching different techniques to perfect their abilities really made even the more basic elemental powers far more intriguing and meaningful. I also think that the way the author balanced the character’s powers with their personalities was done in a good way. For example, there are characters who exude the personality of the power they have. They’re cocky or vain enough to handle and hold the power they do. But there are other characters who are stuck with certain abilities who aren’t so accepting of their powers. I think that this split of personality and power added a ton of depth to the characters and the magical system int he book.
The ending of this book was my favorite part of this book. It was honestly BANG BANG BANG with the reveals and I still remember how I felt about it. I’m not going to lie, it took me a while to get into the book, which I’ll explain more later but when the ending came about, it reinvigorated my interesting int his book and the storyline. I obviously can’t go into detail as to why I liked the ending because that would be way too spoiler filled for a spoiler free review.
Now, let’s move onto what I didn’t like about this book.
My main quip with this book was the writing. I think that my feelings about the writing are a culmination of some technical aspects I didn’t enjoy and my expectations on what I wanted from this book. I think that this book had a ton of potential of becoming my new favorite. A large set of morally gray characters and an academic setting full of magic and a dark atmosphere that promises unpredictability and a ton of tension.
I didn’t get the feeling of tension that one would expect from a book like this with the situation these students were in. The way time passed this book didn’t help with forming any kind of tension in the plot till the very end. There were so many time jumps and while I enjoyed the characters, the combination of constantly switching POV and having weird, sometimes massive, time jumps felt a bit jarring. It resulted in a weird pacing that I’m not used to. For a large part of the book, I felt like things were a bit disconnected. We were reading from so many characters who are meant to be on the same journey and end destination but there wasn’t anything extra holding them together. Extra in this sense can mean tension or any other plot device that would have cemented the plot a bit more.
I thought that the atmospheric, academic situation would be the perfect thing to bring the plot together and really add some tension or depth to the story but the book didn’t really have much world building. This book had a school setting with a cool, magical library. That library in itself promised so much intrigue to the school setting but it wasn’t explored at all. The library was just one aspect of the school setting but there was so much more that was told to us but nothing was shown. There was a lot of telling and not showing and I think it weakened my interesting in picking up this book.
I also wish the author went into more detail about the magic in this book and the character’s powers/abilities. I think it’s kind of annoying when readers expect so much from a book and forget that they’re reading a book and not a social thesis or science textbook. in other words, I think that often times, readers expect way too much from an author when the purpose of the book wasn’t to tell how the character built a drone but rather what the drone metaphorically represented. That being said, I know that reading is a subjective experience and people’s interests are different. Some people are more interested in the science of the drone where as other people are interested in the meaning of the drone. A book can’t please everyone.
I also know that after saying that, I may sound a bit hypocritical in the sense that I wanted more from the author when it came to talking about the character’s powers. Again, I honestly think that this was a result of the telling rather than showing. For example, there’s this one chapter where someone casually makes a black hole from scratch and there’s nothing that preludes or follows up to this blackhole generation to add in the wow, someone just made a blackhole. I’m not asking to read up on Stephen Hawking’s papers and research on space and blackholes and physics but I personally would have wanted to take advantage of these really cool characters and their really cool powers and shown the readers how cool they are.
The scene transitions felt a bit clunky as well and not as smooth as they could have been. For example, there was this chapter where the character starts of a conversation with someone and then they suddenly think about something else. Their thoughts are written in a parentheses to indicate that it’s not part of the ongoing conversation. Except, the thought parentheses is so long, it’s more than a page long and you’re getting flashbacks from a few weeks ago where there’s conversations, and you forget that all this is just the character’s thoughts/reflection until the character goes, “okay anyway” and then continue the conversation with the character. I think that this was a stylistic choice to display the personality of the character but it happened other times as well, with other characters.
I just feel like there was so much missed potential in this book. Again, reading is subjective and so is my review but from what I wanted, this book didn’t deliver till the very end and honestly, it was a bit too late.
Have you read this book? What did you think of it?