Book Review: Did The Atlas Paradox Suffer from Second Book Syndrome?
In short, yes, it did. Along with a massive part of Booktok, I read The Atlas Six last summer and absolutely loved it. Olivie Blake’s self published version was a huge hit on Booktok, and became a staple in Dark Academia and Urban Fantasy rec lists. So The Atlas Paradox has been one of my most anticipated reads of 2022.
This long awaited sequel is here. Was it as good?
Things to know:
Picks up where The Atlas Six leaves off
Multi-POVs, and this one includes a couple new POVs
Slower paced than book one
Unfortunately, it wasn’t as good as the first installment, in my opinion. Characters were separated, so there wasn’t as much interaction, and I missed the dynamic of the group together. It was also abominably slow until about the 60% mark for me. That’s a long time to wait for the action to pick up.
Parisa has really grown on me. And dare I say it? Callum. Actually, the characters I really disliked in book one became some of my favorites in book two, while others I had loved in book one became incredibly irritating. But I loved that we got a lot more Gideon in this book. Blake absolutely knows how to write morally gray characters well. However, I really wish the miscommunication trope wasn’t used quite so much to move the plot forward.
Without giving spoilers, I also had an issue with a certain character’s insanely fast demise–that felt out of left field to me. Like, what was the point?!
I did enjoy the time travel aspect and how it was handled, but I did feel like this second installment lacked a bit of the substance that book one had. I should also note, I reread The Atlas Six before reading this one again to refresh, and I still 100% loved it. It was the publication version, and most of the changes were minor, and improvements.
Will I read book three? Yes. I’ve gotta see how the story ends. If you loved The Atlas Six, I’d say it’s definitely still worth reading, but for me, it was a bit of a let down. If you’ve read it, what did you think?
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