The Atlas Six

The Atlas Six Book Review by Olivie Blake 

This book rocked. 

It wasn’t a perfect book but it was pretty close, or rather, closer than any book that I’ve read in months. 

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake is a mysterious fantasy featuring dark academia, imminent murder, and complex characters and their intrinsic relationships to each other. I love almost everything about it.

Dark Academia is a favorite trope of mine ever since reading M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains and Blake’s novel handles it with a chef’s kiss. Six powerful medians (aka magicians) are selected by the elite secret Society in order to become initiates. 

For a year they will train under the Society’s Caretaker, Atlas Blakely and his assistant, Dalton Ellery, in order to pass Initiation and gain full access to the Society’s archives. 

In this case, the Society’s archives are the knowledge starting with the Library of Alexandria and culminating in thousands of years worth of information gathered by the world’s upper echelon of intellectuals. 

Each protagonist has some motivation for wanting access to these records, whether to save their hybrid-human friend from a dismal existence, finding a cure for a degenerative disease, or even simpler motivations like hunger and ambition. 

While all these aspects in of themselves are fascinating—a secret society, the mythical Library of Alexandria, knowledge beyond your wildest dreams, etc, it was the characters and their connections that really drew me into this novel and held me in its clutches. That and the added plot that one of them will have to die in order for the five other chosen medians to be initiated. 

What starts as a seemingly harmless one-year program slowly devolves until each character, for one reason or another, is willing to kill someone else in order to stay. Dun dun dun. 

When I first started reading and learned that there were six protagonists, I was skeptical, especially as Blake switches POV’s between all of them. In my experience, switching POV’s beyond four people is usually a disaster for most authors as the characters lack development and pages. 

However, Blake does a seamless job of incorporating her characters well, along with their motivations, development, and relationships from being too shafted from one chapter to the next. It’s incredible when you actually consider the book’s length and what she was able to accomplish with six different main characters. 

All of them felt like they got even amounts of focus, and while I did naturally like some more than others, I found to my immense surprise that I didn’t dislike any of them. Blake does a fantastic job of making each character important to the plot as a whole and does well to ensure that each character changes and grows at an understandable rate. 

I’ve been pretty vague about specifics up to this point, so please read with caution onwards. If you don’t want spoilers, you can stop here. 

My favorite characters ended up being Callum, Parisa, and Tristan. Callum I found fascinating—his power, his simultaneously nihilistic and hedonistic view on living, his understanding of emotions and yet lack thereof. He’s a powerful ticking time bomb and all the characters know it, including Callum himself. I found his self-awareness to be addicting and his manipulative tendencies a massive influence on every other character. 

Parisa I liked almost immediately. She’s confident, sly, clever, powerful, and calculating. She knows what she wants and she doesn’t hesitate to go after it. That being said, she’s not heartless. In an encounter with Callum, she finds herself shaken after he murders an intruder. I liked the dichotomy of Parisa, her entanglement with Dalton, and her cutthroat methods to achieve her desires. 

Tristan was my favorite dark horse character. He’s tragic, but interesting. His lack of knowledge about his own power makes him either weak or unbelievably strong—both of which have intriguing implications for the story. I liked his emotional turmoil, his pessimism, and his complex relations with most major players in the story, including Parisa and Callum. More than any other character, I’m excited to see Tristan in Blake’s sequel The Atlas Paradox. 

The other three characters were interesting in their own right, but I didn’t care for them as much. Reina seems to be the most straightforward character, for better or worse, Nico I found to be annoyingly altruistic, and Libby was just annoying. 

I understand that Libby is supposed to be irritating, but I think Blake was almost too effective in making her so. She’s a great comparison character in that she doesn’t see her own value, constantly questions herself, and secretes meekness compared to the others who are confident and self-aware of their powers, but her schtick got old to me very fast. 

Because Blake set Libby up as this stuttering vexation for the others, it was hard for me to believe that the others liked her, especially given their own self-assurant personalities. Nico and Libbby make sense because of their past history. Parisa and Tristan, however, I had a harder time getting behind, Tristan especially. 

Why was he so attached to Libby? To the point that he wondered if he was in love with her? It was a little baffling. Blake does provide some reasoning, being that Libby is powerful, but with that reasoning Tristan could be in love with any of the initiates, so the logic falls a little flat. 

Regardless, that criticism is a small thorn in an otherwise beautiful rose garden. 

An interesting thing Blake chose to do was to showcase very little of what the characters were actually learning from their classes. From my understanding, they had classes daily or weekly, but were otherwise free to read and study in peace. I both liked and disliked this choice. 

On the one hand, the class discussion and subject matter were actually very high-level, often discussing physics, chemistry, and psychology. I both liked how advanced and sophisticated these conversations were compared to the juvenile drivel that YA novels spit out, but at the same time most of it intentionally went over my head. 

It was interesting to me that Blake chose to omit so much of their academics, and while I don’t necessarily disagree, it would have fleshed out the world more to see bigger moments in the characters’ day-to-day-lives. 

That being said, the driving force of my interest, and seemingly the book, were the character relations themselves. I want more. Some of them came across a tad rushed— like since when are Nico and Parisa friends?—but for the most part, the reader can fill in the blanks and make realistic assumptions that certain relationships blossomed. 

However, it still would have been nice to see those progressions, even tiny moments of them, regardless if it inevitably made the book longer. 

The last point I’ll mention is Ezra. The surprise to me at the end was indeed just that: surprising. I didn’t think Ezra would be as important as he became and I loved the reveal overall of Atlas Blakely being the villain—if that actually is true. We shall have to see. 

However, an earlier chapter of Ezra speaking to an unnamed character, only to find out on the last page of the chapter that it’s actually Atlas, was disappointing to me. Not only did it reveal earlier that Ezra was more important than he seemed and not who he seemed, but it deflated some of the tension that the ending otherwise could have had. 

I didn’t get the point of the chapter at all, especially as Ezra essentially espouses some philosophical quandaries about power that largely (and verbosely) goes over the reader’s head. 

Those small criticisms aside, this book was tremendously impressive. The fantasy elements of magic, the myriad abilities, the complex characters, their intertwining bonds, and an unraveling plot of uncertain mysteries where deciding who to trust might be the deadliest decision of all. 

Recommendation: Dark academia now owns my whole heart. This book has everything you want and does it well: an interesting setting that includes the legendary Library of Alexandria, a perplexing plot that beckons me to read more, versatile writing that entices me to think deeply about a multitude of subjects, and labyrinthine characters that I crave more and more.

Score: 9/10