#THIS WHOLE TIME IM HOLDING OUT FOR THROUPLES AND GAY/LESBIAN COUPLES AND WHAT DO I GET? NOTHING

[kbookblurbs]

The Atlas Complex - Olive Blake (The Atlas #3)

1.5/5 - disappointing conclusion to the trilogy; no real satisfying character arcs or conclusions to those arcs; truly baffling character decisions

SPOILERS BELOW

To be completely honest, I read this book more out of a desire to see how, exactly, Blake planned to wrap up the character arcs than any real desire to engage with it because I also found the second book to be disappointing.

Basically, none of the characters are truly served in this book. The one with the best outcome is Callum and he ends up dead anyway. Every single character spends this whole book whining and complaining about their lack of purpose. Over 200 pages of the book go by before anything of note happens. Truly, I think Blake needed an editor and/or someone to tell her the harsh truth - that everything in this nearly 500-page novel could have been said in 200.

I just found myself extremely dissatisfied with the arcs. Reina gets no screentime and undergoes no real change. Nico/Gideon are stagnant. Parisa doesn't do anything interesting until page 350/474. Tristan whines, literally, the whole time about how he doesn't know what his purpose in life is. Libby undergoes a "corruption" arc and still manages to hem and haw and bite her nails the entire time, even though she's supposed to have grown a spine by now. By the end of the book all I wanted was for someone to just do something instead of overthinking their place in the world.

This book also continuously asks questions that I find to be overwritten and that Blake attempts to answer in text. The meaning of life and why humanity is the way it is does not need to be answered in your trilogy about six people without an ounce of backbone or direction between them. Even more so, the answers that Blake provides are not answers I find terribly interesting or useful. I am no longer interested in debating if humanity is fundamentally awful or if people with talent are always directionless and easily swayed to power schemes or if somebody can be both a good and bad person at the same time. These have all been done and, frankly, been done better elsewhere. To have multiple of your characters claim that ethics isn't really "their thing", that their experiments are just that and have no consequences is ... not a good look, particularly after the summer of Oppenheimer and the moral imperative of scientists everywhere. Like, yes, your experiments do have a greater ethical cost. That's common sense, actually.

The worldbuilding remains frightfully vague. The prose used is purposefully convoluted, which meant I had to read probably a third of this book at least twice to actually understand it. And I don't mean that in the there-are-complicated-metaphors-here sense. I mean it in the this-sentence-structure-and-word-choice-are-so-odd-and-complex-as-to-be-useless-to-the-reader sense.

By the time something interesting came up, I was so done with slogging through the rest of the book that it felt like a relief that might come in death. I just wanted it to be over.

Chief among these sins is that Blake also introduced new characters in this (already overstuffed) book that were substantially more interesting than our POV/main characters. Why tease me with concepts that are actually interesting before throwing me back into the weeds? It's cruel.