I don't have a TikTok, but even I heard about The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake once it started attracting attention on BookTok. Once I heard more, it seemed right up my alley—magic, interesting characters, dark academia—so I finally read it. Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed.
The Atlas Six is about six powerful magicians (called medeians) who are invited to join The Alexandrian Society. The Alexandrian Society is a secret society of magical academics, built upon the Library of Alexandria (in this world, it was never destroyed). Its resources are kept secret and available only to members of the Society. These members go on to be very powerful players in the world. Every ten years, six people are chosen to join the Society, but before initiation, one will be eliminated, leaving only five new members. For a year, these six candidates will protect the library and study magic, pushing the limits of what they know and what they can do, while they compete for the five spots.
The book begins with Atlas Blakely, Caretaker of the library, inviting the six candidates to the Society. They are: Libby Rhodes and Nico de Varona, physicists who can manipulate matter, Reina Mori, a naturalist who can influence life itself, Tristan Caine, who can see through illusions, Parisa Kamali, an unmatched mind reader, and Callum Nova, an empath who could destroy the world with only a few words. Over the course of the book, the six characters form relationships, compete, and push the boundaries of their abilities to discover the secrets of the universe.
I'm gonna be honest—I thought I liked this book after I finished it, and then I read some reviews and realized I shared some of the issues they did. The biggest is how pretentious every single one of the characters is. They never seem to have normal conversations. Every word is a manipulation or taunt or calculated to elicit a certain response. And the words themselves are things you only hear in movies or essays. Yes, writing does provide the opportunity for magnificent, sophisticated speeches, but it becomes suffocating when it's literally every paragraph. Here are a few examples of what I mean:
"A flaw of humanity. The compulsion to be unique, which is at war with the desire to belong to a single identifiable sameness."
"We are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal—that we are ordinary. That we, like anything, can burn."
"We’re all starving, but not everyone is doing it correctly. Some people are taking too much, making themselves sick, and it kills them. The excess is poison; even food is a poison to someone who’s been deprived. Everything has the capacity to turn toxic. It’s easy, so fucking easy to die, so the ones who make themselves something are the same ones who learn to starve correctly."
"Ambition was such a dirty word, so tainted, but she had it. She was enslaved by it. There was so much ego to the concept of fate, but she needed to cling to it. She needed to believe she was meant for enormity; that the fulfillment of a destiny could make for the privilege of salvation, even if it didn't feel that way right now."
Beyond that, many of the conversations about magic concern physics and theory that the characters had no trouble following, but I did since I never had a solid grasp of the world. There was never a definition of the distinction between witch and medeian, and I was never quite sure if magic was a secret or not. A lot of my questions were left unanswered, either because they were never addressed or because as soon as the characters did something magically earth-shaking that I was interested in, it was abandoned in favor of exploring their toxic relationships which had already been slapped in my face a dozen times. For a fantasy book, having a strong sense of the world is important, and for me, this one didn't have it.
I will say that I did enjoy the book and that I didn't really have to force myself to finish it. I was interested in the characters and the looming elimination threat, as well as a few other suspicious elements thrown in the middle that hinted at an explosive revelation at the end, so I genuinely looked forward to reaching the end. But looking back, it feels like the whole thing was a tease designed to lead me on. Even so, it did end in a cliffhanger that guarantees I'll read the sequel when it comes out, and hopefully, I'll get some of those answers I hoped for without so much heavy-handed pretentiousness.
With everything considered, I rate The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake 3/5 stars. Here's hoping I like the next book better.
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