“It was waking up every fucking morning and deciding to keep going. A tiny, unceremonious, incomparable miracle of making it through another goddamn day. The knowledge that life was mean and it was exacting, it was cruel and it was cursed, it was recalcitrant and precious. It was always ending. But it did not have to be earned.” Well this was… something. Disappointing, mostly. I did not enjoy it, sadly. The Atlas Complex picks up after the events of the Atlas Paradox, in which the six are separated mostly from each other. Nico and Libby and Gideon are in Paris, Tristan stayed to work for Atlas, Dalton and Parisa are in Osaka, I can’t remember where Reina and Callum are but they are away too. But then Libby and Nico return to Tristan and tell him Atlas is trying to open to another world and that because none of the six actually died for the sacrifice, they may end up dying if one of them doesn’t die. Or one of them isn’t killed. And throughout the book they are kind of just threatening to kill each other and there are outside influences pushing them back together again. For example, Parisa’s husband — I forgot she had a husband for a while — is killed and that puts her on edge in figuring out what happened there. Also Libby isn’t the same anymore after what she went through in the past and then killing Ezra. She is really close to Tristan and is like sleeping with him but one of the things that is really hard for me to figure out in this book is who likes who? They all seem to be getting with each other in one way or another. At one point even Libby and Nico talk about how they I guess are soul mates but that might not mean like romantically? And Nico is like well I basically would get with anyone in the six and also I’m in love with Gideon? I’m not sure how I feel about it but at this point I was just rolling with it. But it really just made me disconnect with the characters because nothing felt true or real. Things started to take a turn for the worst when Libby agrees to do an experiment with Nico to open the multiverse, which atlas had been trying to do, but she backs out halfway through and pushes all the power onto Nico, which kills him. This was such a disappointing death, let me tell you. There seemed to be no resolution for Nico as a character in my opinion, and Libby can wax poetic all she wants about how she lost her other half when she killed him, she still killed him. At the same time, one of the things I did think made sense was Libby’s fall from grace into this sort of murder-y character after all of her morals in the first book, but I just feel like if Nico was going to die it should have been handled better. We kind of get a happy scene where Gideon finds Nico in a dream world of his and they go and be happy but like it’s not real? Anyway Atlas also dies and I was so confused about how; did Libby also kill him? I was confused. Still am. But Callum also dies when he’s shot by Tristan’s father. Also sad considering his apparent strong connection to Tristan. I don’t know man, the whole ending just felt messy. A random guy takes over for the society (I mean he’s not random; it’s Nothazai, but it felt random in that he wasn’t a main character and we only learn his backstory really at the end) and he asks for resources from the library and they deny him, much to Libby’s amusement because it had done that to her for so long, but the book ends with her finally being granted a book that will tell her if she could have saved her sister (who died from an illness, we learned in the first book). Except OB decides to end it there and we don’t find out the answer. Which is fine because at that point I just desperately wanted the book to end so I could be put out of my misery. I know that sounds harsh but again I just felt like the ending of this book was all over the place and I didn’t understand some of the decisions that were made. For example, Atlas died with what felt like very little fanfare and his name is literally in the title of every book and his whole experiment was the reason the story went on for god’s sake. Who even knows what happened to Reina and Parisa. It’s not that I don’t like OB books — I really, really liked Alone with You in the Ether — but I think honestly this series was just not for me. It felt like it was stretched into something it didn’t need to be stretched into, and I’m glad to wipe my hands of it.