mothumn's Reviews (377)

ARC REVIEW
spoiler free review

The Atlas Six is about a secret society of medeians (people with unique magical abilities) that has a competition to initiate new recruits. Within this world the library of Alexandria still exists but is kept secret only to be accessed by the secret society. Of the six recruits only 5 will be initiated, The Atlas Six follows the recruits and the recruitment process they go through.

While reading this, I found the world with its connections to ancient Rome very interesting and the concept of the story was unique. I’ve been hearing about this book everywhere, it’s gone viral on booktok and every other social media. However, I unfortunately was not amazed by this, I found the characters to be undeveloped and very tropey, and also pretty annoying. Unlikeable characters are not something I’m against in books, but there is typically something that still makes you want to read about them but I didn’t find anything really interesting about them. The characters of Nico, Libby, and Reina I found to be okay, but the others, particularly Callum, were annoying to the point that I wanted to skip over their point of view.

However, the plot was interesting and wanting to find out who wouldn’t make it is what kept me reading. I like the idea of a secret society and the magic system was unique. The challenge was not something I had really seen before. It took a long time to actually pick up (almost halfway) but once it did it had me interested. I definitely didn’t see the twist coming at the end, but I don’t know if that's necessarily a good thing. It didn’t feel very deserved, there was no foreshadowing or build up so it didn’t really make sense to me. It definitely left me curious about the sequel though, I might check it when it’s released.

While the plot was interesting and I can definitely see it really being some people's thing, the writing style was something that I unfortunately didn’t care for. I found it to be very wordy and often over explaining parts. It felt a lot like big words were thrown in just to make it feel more clever, often while reading I felt like it sounded as though a thesaurus was used to find a synonym to every other word. The dialogue as well had this problem, the characters were often saying things in a very faux intellectual, very artificial way, often saying things in metaphors or being very vague. It often felt like they were trying to be quippy but I kept finding that I literally just didn’t know what they were talking about. It felt pretty pretentious to me, but not in a way that made sense to connect back to the characters and everything but more just trying to be overly clever. I think that this was the main thing that brought it down for me, it just slowed down the pace and was what made the characters annoying and artificial.

Despite all my problems with it, I do think the story has a lot of potential which I’m hoping to see expanded on in the sequel. While I didn’t like the characters a lot I do think that Nico and Reina just need some development for me to like them. The side characters as well, like Nico’s roommates I thought were interesting and I’d love to see more of them in the future. I also enjoyed the more political parts of the society and the ability the story had to point out the flaws and make observations on topics such as classicism within education. I hope to see that expanded on, especially with the events of the ending.

While I personally found the story to be underwhelming, I think that it has a lot of potential and think that it would definitely be something that a lot of people would really enjoy. I’m hopeful for the sequel and recommend to everyone who’s interested to check out the Atlas Six to form their own opinion.

just wasnt into it

im sorry but this is boring