The Fussy Reader

So this turned out to be a longer review than expected, but I had a lot of conflicted thoughts I needed to get down whilst reading. I didn't mean it to come out gripey, but I write my thoughts as I read to make a more genuine reaction. Though I was hoping for a little more positivity whilst reading, it is what it is. I won't sugar-coat my review

I first discovered this book in my recommendations on Amazon and bought it after learning that TOR had acquired the rights and would be publishing it next year. It was on my radar anyway, but I was interested to see what the book was like before being published traditionally.

I love anything even remotely considered dark academia. I find the genre so atmospheric and satisfying to read. Surprisingly, this particular book also had some very strong fantasy themes as well, which made the concept a very specific type of special for me.

However, this book took me 26 days to finish. 26 fucking days! For 383 pages. I know I'm a slow reader, but the length of time it takes me to read a book speaks volumes about my connection to it.

Characters
As this book is so heavily character-driven (to the point where there's limited plot), I'll spend the most time talking about the main six POV characters.
The strongest characters for me were Nico and Reina. I really grew to love them. They didn't seem to give a shit what the nasty group thought of them, which was immensely satisfying.

Nico, though initially mean and rude to Libby, became something of a sweetheart. I see now looking back that the two were more a case of frienemies. They bicker and tease each other like siblings, or a married couple, and at times it's almost quite sweet. They clearly do it more out of habit than anything else. I love how his frienemy relationship with Libby developed. He totally had her back.

Reina, like Nico, was an instant favourite for me. She's the quiet one, literally oozing power. She's a mystery and reveals nothing, which is also a little unfortunate, cause I would've loved to have gotten to know her better. I feel that, out of all the characters, she's sort of the forgotten one. She isn't in nearly as many chapters as some of the other characters, and she's spoken of far less. For such a strong character with boundless potential, she's just generally underused.

Libby is polite and inquisitive and for some reason, all the others resent her for it. Like literally all of them are nasty to her for the longest time, like it's her fault she's a considerate person. So many times I wished Libby would just tell them to go fuck themselves. It's passive bullying, and I hate bullying. Tristan even says to her at one point "you don't have to be sorry for existing." Then stop fucking making her feel that way, Tristan. You're part of the problem too, dick head!

Prisa was a love-hate relationship for me. I took a pretty immediate dislike to Prisa. I'm sorry, but she was a fucking bitch in the beginning and her personality stank. I wouldn't associate myself with someone like her in real life. However, she definitely grew on me. I hit a certain point in the book, about halfway through, and it was like a switch was flicked. Suddenly all the characters I hated were quickly becoming some of the strongest in the book.

Tristan is another case of love-hate. I didn't gel with his character much at all in the first half of the book and then bam! Suddenly I'm vibing with the dude.
And I'll mention this here cause I don't know where else to put it. But I noticed an inconsistency with his character. In his first chapter, he's wearing glasses while he works. As this is how he's first introduced, I continued to picture him with glasses. But then him wearing glasses is literally never mentioned again and neither is he wearing them in his character art, so what, I guess Tristan just doesn't wear glasses now.

Callum was also a dick for a very long time. But after seeing him in a Tristan chapter, he suddenly became a very interesting, nuanced character. Though flawed, and undeniably manipulative, I felt a sense of empathy towards him after this chapter. Like I finally saw him for who he really is, and after that, I just couldn't bring myself to hate him. It's almost a shame that he's deliberately written as the bad guy because he's quite a fascinating character.

Tbh, it took so long for certain characters to become likeable, that by the time I did like them, I'd already long picked my favourites. And it sure wasn't Prisa, Tristan, or Callum. The unholy trinity. Yet they really shone in the second half of the novel and truly redeemed themselves in some regard, whether that was proving to be a good person after all, or just a good character after all. Everyone brought something to the table that was worthy of being there. I never imagined I'd end up liking them so much, but here we are.

But don't get me wrong. I know that these characters are purposely written to be morally dickish. They're clashing personalities and it shows fantastically. However, for this reason, the characters aren't on equal footing. Because Callum is deliberately made a manipulative arse hole towards the others, the very last thing the reader wants is for him to succeed. The character POVs are a little bias at times, and it shows. Whilst poor Reina is forgotten entirely.

I think the reason why it took me so long to warm to Tristan, Callum and Parisa was because I just didn't know them. I didn't understand what their motivations were for taking Atlas's offer. I didn't know what their personal stakes were. I didn't know what they hoped to gain or what they had to lose. They weren't developed past being the antagonistic characters. I didn't struggle with them because they were bad people, I struggled with them because they were bad characters.

And while we're here, I feel it has to be said. For a book called The Atlas Six, there's surprisingly little of Atlas himself. Atlas Blakely, the man, the myth, the legend. The charming teacher character who brings the group together. I figured he would be an important and influential figure in the lives of the Six, the driving force behind many of the harrowing decisions they make, but he's barely present. He appears in the beginning, naturally, then completely disappears for the whole middle of the book, and then shows up again at the end. Is he even in the Society house, cause it feels a whole lot like he's letting the clowns run the circus and buggered off. These kids are still only initiates. They need guidance. They need that classic teacher figure that Dark Academia is famous for.
He's less the charismatic teacher figure and more just a magical talent scout.

Plot
I think the best way to describe this book is potential. As in, it could be something really fucking special and unique if the author sat down with a developmental editor and figured out what the actual plot of this story is.
There's a lot of abstract theorising, prosaic musings, and wordy hypothesising about magical theory, but the actual plot doesn't go anywhere beyond that until about 300 pages in.
Idea-wise, it has a lot going for it, but right now it's lacking structure and discipline. It could do with an Atlas Blakely of its own to guide it... (if Atlas Blakely actually did more than just throw a bunch of horny, angsty twenty-somethings into a mansion and basically just instruct them to do stuff.)

The whole thing, for a long time, was lacking a 'why'.
I understood Nico's reason for participating (though only just. Even that moral dilemma was a little thin for me). He was the only one that seemed to have any personal stakes attached to his motives. But it seemed a lot like the others were there simply cause they had nothing better to do or nowhere better to be. Which doesn't really make the experience feel personal enough for any of them, except Nico.
Another 'why' I had: Why would Atlas entrust the defence of such rare archives in the hands of a bunch of arrogant a-holes?

And it bothered me that important moments were brushed over in favour of yet more angsty, philosophical conversations of no real importance. If the wormhole phenomenon created by Nico and Libby is as much of a monumental discovery as the characters make it out to be, why are we only told about it happening in passing and not actually shown this great discovery in the making. Why should I care about how important it is when I haven't been given reason to? And why are they even doing this in the first place? It's not explained, and then we literally never see or make use of this very important wormhole ever again.

As much as I liked Nico, I didn't care much for the Gideon and Eilif story arc. I liked that it gave Nico a slither of purpose and agency, but I guess I didn't see the point to it cause, again, I didn't know the 'why' behind it. If I don't know why something is happening or why it's important, then I'm just not going to be as invested.

As the reader, we're not even invited to share in the secrets of the society. As Reina reads her way through the Library of Alexandria, musing how it contained everything she'd dreamed of, I was left waiting eagerly for her to fill me in on what that was. But she didn't. A vague and brief list of -ologies and -isms was given, but, like, why? What's the importance of cosmology here? Why is Reina reading about animism? These words are used but there's no context as to why. I don't know what Reina is researching or why, nor do I know why it's so important to her to have all this ancient information. I don't know her motivation!
For me, half the essence of dark academia is to discover secrets and knowledge alongside the characters and have my mind blown by the sheer intelligence of it all. Here, however, I'm left thoroughly out the loop.

Now, I must say, the last 70 or so pages were undeniably gripping and the best part of the book. I raced through those pages and couldn't wait to get back to it when I stopped. Credit where it's due, talk about a crescendo of an ending. I quite liked the twist ending and it does have me interested in picking up the sequel some time.

Setting
I was unprepared for how heavy the fantasy elements would be in this book. I was more expecting dark academia with a touch of magic. But this is a full-blown magical world in the way Harry Potter is, except it's not a secret.
I actually loved the idea of the universities of magic but when strange species and creatures were introduced, it kinda threw me off. It felt so unexpected and odd, and there was little context for it within the world. Honestly, I think the reason why it felt so out of place to me was because it's not mentioned at all until it's needed. I think if the world was fleshed out a little more beforehand, or even just hinted at that other species exist in this world, then it may not have felt like such a sucker punch when the non-human characters were introduced.

The magic system is very interesting but underdeveloped and never actually explained. Very lengthy and wordy descriptions of the magic is used, but none of it seems to say anything at all. I'd read sentences more than once, each time slower, just to try and make sense of all the words being strung together, but it was all so vague and insubstantial that it never gave me a clear image of the magic in use, nor any indication of how it actually works. It felt more like the writing was trying really hard to make itself sound so intelligent that there was no way the basic reader could comprehend it anyway, so it totally doesn't need to make sense, right?

But don't misunderstand me, this isn't a bad book. Far from it. I just wanted more, and frustratingly, I really feel like it was on the cusp of more, it just never fully realised itself.

Writing Style
So I'd be a fool to try and deny that this is a beautifully written book. The prose is stunning and stylistically it's really intelligent, a tone that's super fitting for a dark academia novel. It's an easier read in that it's very fluid. I didn't stumble on oddly arranged sentences as I sometimes can. It flows very smoothly from one word to another which makes it very tempting to keep reading, even when it's late.

Credit to the author. There are no typos in here, that I found, which is an absolute delight. Even trad pub books have plenty of those, so naturally, I find quite a few more in self-pub books. Not normally a problem unless it's excessive. But The Atlas Six, in terms of spelling and grammar, is incredibly refined and professional.

My only issue with the writing was perhaps the authorial voice was too strong and overshadowed the characters' individual voices. Prose-wise, the characters all read the same. They had the same rhythm to their internal dialogue and the same way of deducing information about their fellows. At times, I'd even forget whose POV I was in because each one sounded so similar to read.
The strength of the authorial voice was, unfortunately, the weakness of the character voices.

Also, something the writing is guilty of doing far too often is flashbacks of conversations when a character is already in the middle of a conversation with someone else. And they're long flashbacks too. By the time they ended and we went back the present and the original conversation, I'd forgotten what they were even talking about before the flashback happened.
This happened a lot and this particular device got annoying.

Also there was a weird moment where the Netherlands is referred to as a Nordic country. It's not. The Dutch may have similar attributes to the Danish, but they're not Danish. This tiny detail threw me off to the point of doing a whole minute's worth of googling to learn the truth and I can't help but feel the author should have done the same. It took me longer to write this petty gripe than it did to Google whether the Netherlands is a Nordic country.

I'll mention the artwork here, as the presentation of the book best suits this category, I think. The cover art is stunning. The first time I saw it was in my recommendations on Amazon whilst browsing books and I was immediately drawn to it due to the cover art. 10/10 can't fault the art. And the drawings of the characters dotted through the book itself are beautifully drawn. I really appreciated having these visual guides of the characters throughout. I wish more books included character art. Absolutely stunning.

Final Impression
I would be quite interested to buy the traditionally published version of this book next year just to see if it's been edited at all. But unfortunately, as this book is so popular as is, I don't think that would be the case. I can see it getting a brief once over from a line editor, to fix the formatting at least, but I really can't see it having the overhaul it needs, and quite frankly, deserves. This book is a well of untapped potential and dearly deserves to reach it if only worked through with a dev editor. I would love to read the TOR version of this book in the future and discover the problems I found with it to be fixed, but I can't see it happening, tbh. Which is a real shame because, as I said, this book deserves to be a pillar in the dark academia genre.

On the whole, I found it very slow and lacking actual plot, but the ending greatly saved this book for me. If not for the ending, I might have rated this lower.
In conclusion: Overhyped by a country mile, but dripping with the potential to be something truly wonderful.

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