A review by maabel
The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

1.0

Something I swear by: a book isn’t well written if I’m able to tell which characters are the author’s favourites. Hence why this was a 1 star read. Among other reasons ofc.
I recently tried to reread this bcs I thought I might have missed the point of it the first time around, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case and I honestly think this is just a bad book. What a shame <3
The concept is nice, but that wasn’t enough to save this book from all its negatives:

•The over-flowery language on virtually every page - sometimes it’s nice to read pretty words and polysyllables, but every page?! There’s a difference between intriguing the reader with fancy words and making them feel like an idiot because they have absolutely no clue what you’re harping on about… is this a novel or a physics textbook?? bffr

•The lack of worldbuilding… clearly the author was picturing a super detailed world in her head, and I wish she could have spent more time describing it to us; maybe this was just a me problem, but describing small details goes a long way. And given this author’s tendency to blab on about god-knows-what, I’d have thought her descriptions of the metaphysical may have been balanced out by the physical… clearly not.

•My original point: character favouritism. Surely Blake realised at some point during the manuscript that she WAY preferred Tristan to every other character (and had some sort of allergy to writing about Reina) - like if it was that obvious to the readers how did the writer miss it? All she had to do was either a) balance out the chapter distribution, b) give her less-preferred characters something to make them more interesting to her, c) cut them out entirely and focus solely on her favourites (maybe this would have led to a more conclusive ending and satisfactory character development) or d) lose the favouritism and cry about it later. Like??? Kill your darlings or develop them until they match the others. Not that hard. The whole point of the six characters (imo) is that the reader can find their favourite by themselves; when the author interferes, it’s almost impossible to separate author from story, which is pretty essential, especially when writing fantasy/dystopia/whatever the fuck this was.

•The ending??? w h a t w a s t h a t
I get that she was going to write a sequel, but that isn’t an excuse to end the novel with literally no conclusion whatsoever. How is that supposed to make me want to read the sequel?? Istg I got to the ending and I was so confused because I realised that I had literally no clue what was going on, thanks to the fucking 284737283 plot points of each individual character that literally never link up or conclude (nor have some kind of cliffhanger), not to mention the vast expanses of fancy language that were probably supposed to explain the plot to some extent but that made me feel like I didn’t even speak English… likeeeeee
The only good thing about the ending was that the book was over. woohoo

There are more reasons for my strong dislike of this book, but the main point is: it’s not a good book. I have no clue why it got hyped up so much; there are much better fantasy/dystopia novels out there, but whatever.
If you’re halfway through this book and hating it, just read the last page and call it a day: I guarantee you’ll be just as lost as you were before <3