Books I Didn't Finish: The Atlas Six

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So I was recently strolling through my local bookshop, looking at things to buy on my Kindle for substantially cheaper prices, when I spotted one of those “BookTok made me buy it” shelves, and I got curious—what are the TikToks making the kids buy these days?

Of the options available, Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Six seemed the most up my alley. I had vaguely heard that it’s Buzzworthy and Bingeworthy and various other kinds of worthies, so surely it has to be a compelling and well-written tale, right?

Right?

Here’s how the book starts:

“Perhaps it was a tired thing, all the references the world had already made to the Ptolemaic Royal Library of Alexandria.”


Okay actually, I was going to quote an entire paragraph, but real quick: is it just me, or is this a really clunky opening sentence? 

Anyway, continuing on:

“History had proven the library to be endlessly fascinating as a subject, either because the obsession with what it might have contained was bound only by the imagination or because humanity longs for things most ardently as a collective. All men can love a forbidden thing, generally speaking, and in most cases knowledge is precisely that; lost knowledge even more so. Tired or not, there is something for everyone”


It was here, well before the end of the first paragraph, that I began to suspect that BookTok had led me astray.

Isn’t this exactly how you’re not supposed to open a book? By rambling on about setting backstory and philosophy , with no indication of whose thoughts there are meant to be? I swear every “How To Not Write Bad” guide I’ve ever seen has cautioned against doing this, and that always made sense to me. Did we decide as a species that that’s no longer the case?

After some more of this (too much more) we discover that the person blathering directly into our consciousness is someone named Dalton Ellery, and he segues straight into a big ol’ infodump about the story we’re about to read.

“As the world spread—expanding beyond the libraries of Babylon, Carthage, Constantinople to the collections of Islamic and Asian libraries lost to imperialism and empire—so did the Alexandrian archives, and as medeian influence expanded, so did the so-called Society itself. Every ten years a new class of potential initiates was chosen to spend one year in training, learning the functions of the archives and what would eventually become a lifelong craft.

[…]

This was what Dalton Ellery relayed to the most recent class of candidates”


And just to fuck with you, this isn’t written in first person even though the first few pages really feel like they are.

The prologue ends and chapter one skips back to several hours earlier, which to my mind is always a bad sign since it indicates that the author wasn’t very confident in their opening and so decided to insert a flash-forward to something more interesting.

This chapter introduces us to Libby, one of our protagonists, and it was that I realized I was reading one of those genre novels that really, really reads like YA even though it’s ostensibly written for adults.

What gave it away? Mainly the fact that the chapter opens on Libby complaining—at length—about having to sit next to an annoying bad-boy named Nico, who she detests, even though he’s so hot you guys. Yes, they’re sitting together on stage at a college graduation ceremony instead of in biology class, but if you’re at all familiar with post-Twilight YA then this is going to cause flashbacks.

It’s been quite a while since I was in my early twenties so maybe I’m just out of touch, but this feels a little juvenile for college graduates. “I hate him but he’s so dreamy like woah” is the sort of mindset I’d expect most people to have grown out of by this point.

Here’s what the dialogue sounds like:

““Hm. Odd. Do you smell smoke, Rhodes?” 

Very funny. Hilarious.

“Careful, Varona. You know this auditorium’s on a fault line, don’t you?” 

“Of course. Have to, seeing as I’ll be working on it next year, won’t I?” he mused. “Pity you didn’t get that fellowship, by the way.””


I can’t help but read this in a (fake) English accent, even though these people are supposed to be American. The author is American as well,so maybe she’s one of those anglophiles who had her brain scrambled from watching too much Doctor Who.

The other thing you’ll notice about the dialogue is how Quippy it is; according to reviews of the book, more or less all of it is written the same way, and the part I sampled certainly supports that conclusion.

But it’s not just the dialogue that’s trying too hard, the prose is annoying as well. Here’s a sample:

“Barring any accidental encounters, which Libby was certain they’d both furiously ignore—Manhattan was a big place, after all, with plenty of people ravenously avoiding each other—she and Nico were finally going their separate ways, and she would never have to work with Nico de Varona again. She’d practically burst into song over it that morning, which her boyfriend, Ezra, presumed to be the consequence of the occasion’s more immediate matters”


Apart from some really awkward word choices (“ravenously” avoiding each other?), the thing that stands out about this is a weird sort of faux-Victorian ornateness, even though, again, this is happening in New York in the modern day.

Here’s some more examples:

“Since the comment was clearly designed to annoy her, Libby made the exemplary decision to peer into the crowd in lieu of answering.

[…]

Libby registered it, the empty seat, just as a teenage girl in high-top sneakers snaked through the row, dodging someone’s cane-assisted grandmother and giving the whole group an antiestablishment grimace. It was such an uncanny juxtaposition, so acutely timed: the familiar sliver of youthful ennui (ambivalence in a strapless dress) and the empty chair next to her parents.”

This sort of writing just reads like the author trying to show off. We also get more bizarre, borderline nonsensical word choices (“the exemplary decision to peer into the crowd”, “antiesablishment grimace”) which communicate nothing except the author’s familiarity with a thesaurus. 

And it’s a shame, because there are some well-observed moments here, like Libby recognizing her father in the crowd because he only has one good blazer that he wears to every formal event. That communicates a lot without the reader needing to be explicitly told.

Part of me really wants to keep reading this to see if the rest of the book is really this annoying, but my health issues leave me with not a whole lot of energy and I frankly don’t want to waste what little I have. Maybe some day, Atlas Six.