oh buddy, there’s a lot unfortunately😭
i’m so sorry if you loved it or are offended, but i have so much rage in my body after this series, even years later. you can disagree and i will FULLY respect it, i just can never see this book in a good light. this is truly just me being a hater and ranting w/o making sure i sound literate🫶🏽
i really disliked the writing style, first off; it felt like a fanfiction (which is NOT a bad thing—we love fanfiction lmao) of a story that we know nothing about. the author wrote the exposition in random scenarios every now and then, which is SO disappointing since she would gloss over the crucial backstories of her characters to jump into a meaningless plot where the characters said and did next to nothing. she doesn’t establish her characters in a way that lets us decide who the characters are on our own. instead of letting us learn about the characters to grow and rave about them as much as she does, she tells us how likable or “morally grey” they are. some people eat it up nonetheless, but i couldn’t because i could not for the life of me understand why libby was “so annoying”—she would just ask questions, which is COMPLETELY NORMAL?? y’all are at a secret society that you knew nothing about, why the hell are the other characters NOT asking questions? then there’s parisa, whose one personality trait is being hot. and callum, who isn’t a morally grey babygirl, he’s just a pathetic psychopath💀 don’t get me started on the rest of her characters. anyway, the point is that the bones of the story are completely skipped so the author can tell us about a bunch of pricks being horny. for each other. for some reason.
next, the magic system makes no sense. the secret society makes no sense. the enemies make no sense. nothing makes sense. there’s no drive behind the characters, plot, or societies besides wanting to be the most elite pretentious douchebags.
for the third point, it feels like the author bit off more than she could chew. in EVERY book. she’d set up something interesting, just to toil around for 300 pages and then give us a shitshow of an ending each time. we have such a good premise in the beginning of the story and then we fall off; the author’s not even doing a book that’s character-driven (i LOVE character driven books, but this is NOT that) because in character driven books, the characters are still DOING something—whether it contributes to the plot or theme, or not. there’s still something happening. meanwhile in this series, the characters are literally just pondering and yapping for SO LONG. it doesn’t help that majority of them are caricatures of people instead of the complex characters olivie blake claims them to be. this is a huge reason as to why reading the books feels so painful to me.
fourth, why is the writing so pretentious?? the author has no idea what she’s talking about. it’s literally pseudo-intellectual NONSENSE. this is dark academia, but why does the academia make no sense😭
also, the ending to the entire series wasn’t satisfying for me at all. i’m not a hater of sad or dark endings, so long as they’re done right. the way she handled the third book felt like the author had no idea what she was doing and spiraled until she shat that out. characters were not done true justice and their contributions to the series truly amounted to nothing in hindsight. there wasn’t a point to any of it for me.
and lastly, there was no redeeming quality of the overall story to me. everything was so poorly handled and i finished it out of pure stubbornness and curiosity of how she was going to end this series. which i now regret😭
i think if olivie blake had an editor, more time to fully flesh everything out, and no social media influence on her writing, this could’ve been done better. i truly do respect the author’s grind and her passion to write tho. and i find a lot of joy in seeing fanfiction writers publish their own stories and getting recognition, i just wish i found as much joy in The Atlas 6. unfortunately, this is not the case lmao.
so yeah, i’m all for you and other people having opinions and finding beauty where others can’t, but holy shit this was the worst thing i’ve read and i can not ever forgive my fyp for shoving this down my throat, just for it to turn out to be the biggest disappointment. i’ve suddenly become very cautious of who i get book recs from now😅
(but fr if you listed the reasons why you loved it, i’m ALL FOR reading that bc i think it’s cool when people see things that i didn’t :))
