8 Things I Don’t Understand in The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

April 04, 2023

Hello! I’m back! I read this book back in September 2022 and I have written this in my doc right after finishing the book, but I haven’t published it somehow. When I found this doc, I have forgotten what I have read in The Atlas Six, so I didn’t edit my original text and decided to publish it anyway. I honestly am surprised I wrote this in English. Cool! The September 2022 me could write this.

I decided to publish this script because I might change my opinions about this book in the future, and it’s nice to look back to my younger self’s opinions and get more insight from this blog post.

Length : 479 pages

Date released : January 31, 2020

Date read : September 1-8, 2022

Goodreads rating : 3.71

My rating : 1.50

Keywords : adult, fantasy, secret society, competition, magic, mystery, LGBT

Where to read : Storytel

BLURB

“Secrets. Betrayal. Seduction.

Welcome to the Alexandrian Society.

When the world’s best magicians are offered an extraordinary opportunity, saying yes is easy. Each could join the secretive Alexandrian Society, whose custodians guard lost knowledge from ancient civilizations. Their members enjoy a lifetime of power and prestige. Yet each decade, only six practitioners are invited – to fill five places.

Contenders Libby Rhodes and Nico de Varona are inseparable enemies, cosmologists who can control matter with their minds. Parisa Kamali is a telepath, who sees the mind’s deepest secrets. Reina Mori is a naturalist who can perceive and understand the flow of life itself. And Callum Nova is an empath, who can manipulate the desires of others. Finally there’s Tristan Caine, whose powers mystify even himself.

Following recruitment by the mysterious Atlas Blakely, they travel to the Society’s London headquarters. Here, each must study and innovate within esoteric subject areas. And if they can prove themselves, over the course of a year, they’ll survive. Most of them.”

MY THOUGHTS

First of all, I don’t understand what I’ve just finished. If you love this book and have more understanding about what things this book tried to tell, please tell me down below. So below, I mentioned everything I want to know or things I think unclear in this book, in case someone wants to know :

1. THE MAGIC SYSTEM

This book didn’t give clear explanation about the magic system, especially each character’s abilities which usually includes : what their abilities are, what the strength, and what the limitation of their powers. I believe empath and telepath in every fantasy book will be different from each other. Since there’s no single explanation about it, the only empath and telepath stuff I remember is from Keeper of the Lost Cities, so my brain instantly made reference to this book, and of course it’s completely different.

2. THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ALEXANDRIAN SOCIETY

This book only stated that being a member of this society guarantees you power, wealth, and everything you can dream of, but how they get those stuff is unclear. So the motives of each character is unclear too when it comes to why they choose to kill to stay there. As a reader, The Society isn’t compelling enough for me to want to be part of them.

3. WORLD BUILDING

The world building is vague, so most of the time I only pictured big rooms with bookshelf in it because there were no explanations about where they did something. So whenever a character moved to a place, I couldn’t change the picture inside my head because there was no enough narration about that place.

4. CONVERSATIONS

The conversations are so difficult to understand, I doubt real people talk like this. The style is so repetitive where : [someone said something, unfinished yet] [description about that someone doing something which made me forget what they were talking about] [continuing the unfinished sentences] which somehow pissed me off. I can follow long conversations like The Picture of Dorian Gray has, but this book cut someone’s sentences unnecessarily to show what that someone did.

5. THE WHY

If this Atlas guy wants to get 4 people at the first place for his perfect team, then why invited these six people then removed the two? This mess won’t happen if Atlas only directly selected the people he needed and created his perfect team, because in the end he is related to another character who turned out to be doing something to one of the characters. If you know this person would do this, why bother did something you know would lead to a chaos?

6. THE CHARACTERS

There were no descriptions about how the characters look like other than their nationalities. I think Libby and Nico would be interesting duo by the story goes, but it’s as if everyone goes on random way and I think Reina didn’t get the proper amount of chapters here. The chapter they each got felt like just fillers for this book to present the twist and the end. As for Gideon and Max, this book didn’t explain who they are and what they can do and why they were here in this book.

I listened to the audiobook version, there are some narrators for the different six main characters yet I didn’t find their characters stand out or differ from each other. So it’s really difficult to keep up with the story especially the ones with long conversations in it without stating who was speaking which.

7. THE PLOT TWIST

This didn’t surprise me anymore because this one character suddenly came to one of the chapters and they got one chapter before everything happened, and it’s so predictable and I was disappointed more because when they revealed why Atlas did this, that just created more questions for me.

8. THE FOUND FAMILY

Someone said it has found family, but I couldn’t find one. The characters were only talking things I couldn’t understand, did something they abandoned later, and suspected and betrayed each other.