alaterdate | The Atlas Six

The first 46 pages of The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake reeled me in. It starts with the gathering of six magical candidates who will compete for entry into the mysterious Alexandrian Society. Only five will be fully initiated, and it is up to the six candidates to decide who they will eliminate. The beginning is really fun because it slips into the heist model of recruitment. Unfortunately, the fun doesn't last long and my attention began to wane.

The story is character driven, but the characters have no drive. Character motivations are practically non-existent for both the protagonists and antagonists. The main characters insist they've gained some great power, but I see no evidence of it ever being used enough for them to become cognizant that it is some feat. "She was reading some great tome from some great forgotten age about some great phenomena." And?
There's also a lot of talk about alliances, manipulation, and betrayal but there really isn't any. The alliances form quickly and never really rupture. I've watched several seasons of The Challenge and never have I seen alliances so quickly formed never fall apart. Blake could have benefited tremendously from watching a few episodes.

The characters are interesting, but they don't live up to their potential. And when a character says they've come to care for another I hardly believe it when they barely interact with each other despite being stuck in the same house for a year.
At first I thought the characters were distinct, but in retrospect their voices are very similar; the way you know who is speaking is by who is currently doing the naval gazing.There were six main characters and 6+ POVs, which led to an incredibly unbalanced screen-time between the characters. The book started with Libby's POV so one might imagine her to be the mainest of main characters (yes, she's supposed to be as you see in the end), but her chapter lengths are usurped by the author's clear favorite, Parisa. In fact it is even mostly Parisa who gathers the threads of mystery that the author puts out while Libby is in the dark to the end. The "bad" guy character of the main six has barely any chapters and nothing of consequence happens in them. Blake had no idea what to do with him besides have him wax poetic on villains in fiction and how he was not like them. He's my favorite simply because I got to imagine most of him for myself.

The magic and the setting are barely stage props to the character's inner monologues. In this world there are people who can use magic called Medians, and what they are called is all you will ever be told about them.

As for the writing, it's an easy read. I wouldn't say the prose is purple because hardly anything is described, there are some ham-fisted metaphors, but meh those are abundant in a lot of books. I also didn't find it too pretentious on the author's part (I've read much more pretentious "dark academia"). It's more full of a pseudo-intellectualism that is donned by the characters which I didn't mind too much; these are characters just out of uni, who have already been told they're special for their whole lives (except for Tristan) so I can excuse some lofty, but ultimately empty language.
There's a lot of info-dumping and compression of scenes by telling us what happened after the fact. It makes the accomplishments of the characters (who we are told are accomplishing things) fall flat when scenes that would have been fun to delve into are simply glossed over. In the absence of grounding the characters within their reality they are grounded in habit and thought, repetitively at times. This writing style really runs more on the fume of vibes rather than technical skill.

All that said—I didn't hate it. And I'm not certain why that is. I think the author is good at dropping crumbs of flavor that I once tasted in better books and so I have hope of taking a full bite, but the meal never quite arrives.