The Atlas Six
Jan. 6th, 2023 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThe Atlas Six by Olivie Blake was one of my Christmas presents and an interesting book to start the year.
Six magicians with different specialties are invited to join the Alexandrian Society - they will have to live together at the library for year, studying magic, and then eliminate one of their number before the other five can be fully initiated.
This book is a masterclass in writing layered, engaging, deeply flawed characters and making the reader care about all of them, regardless of their moral compass.
It's also an incredibly intricate battle between multiple factions, with a lot of science and magic theory thrown in. I have to admit I found it difficult to follow in places, particularly when one of the main 'rules' seemed to get broken without consequence towards the end. It gets quite repetitive, in that the characters are stuck in one place for most of the book, circling around each other and trying to forge alliances - but it was never less than compelling, despite a huge amount of 'telling' and a massive exposition dump during the climax.
So, while I enjoyed it and found nearly all of the characters fascinating, it was a bit of a struggle in some ways. I'm enormously impressed by it, but perhaps not invested enough to carry on with the series.
Six magicians with different specialties are invited to join the Alexandrian Society - they will have to live together at the library for year, studying magic, and then eliminate one of their number before the other five can be fully initiated.
This book is a masterclass in writing layered, engaging, deeply flawed characters and making the reader care about all of them, regardless of their moral compass.
It's also an incredibly intricate battle between multiple factions, with a lot of science and magic theory thrown in. I have to admit I found it difficult to follow in places, particularly when one of the main 'rules' seemed to get broken without consequence towards the end. It gets quite repetitive, in that the characters are stuck in one place for most of the book, circling around each other and trying to forge alliances - but it was never less than compelling, despite a huge amount of 'telling' and a massive exposition dump during the climax.
So, while I enjoyed it and found nearly all of the characters fascinating, it was a bit of a struggle in some ways. I'm enormously impressed by it, but perhaps not invested enough to carry on with the series.
