This sequel to The Atlas Six picks up almost immediately where the first book left off. Thankfully, the novel has a killer (excuse the sort of pun?) ending that more than proves worth the journey to reach it, though it’s likely some readers will be annoyed about how long it takes to get there. But the pace of this book is positively glacial at times, and it’s often a textbook example of middle story syndrome, occasionally struggling to clearly articulate the reason for its existence. Blake’s prose remains gorgeous, and her characters are realistically messy, running the gamut from sympathetic disasters to offputtingly self-obsessed jerks. It’s a deeply philosophical, extremely nerdy exploration of ethics and morality that ticks a lot of the boxes about what the whole idea of the dark academia sub-genre is supposed to be and do in the first place. Perhaps there was no way that anything that came after those kinds of highs could ever hope equal them, particularly not the middle novel in a trilogy, which can’t give us the answers we’re so desperately seeking. How do you follow up a viral phenomenon? That is, at least in part, the question we must ask of The Atlas Paradox, Olivie Blake’s highly anticipated sequel to the popular dark academia novel The Atlas Six, a self-published fantasy debut that went so viral it won a publishing deal and dominated social media publishing discussion for months.
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