Shawna Ayoub moves "beyond a book review" in not only recommending great books by diverse writers but highlighting a technique to apply to your own writing practice.
The Atlas Trilogy, by Olivie Blake
Look. Sometimes you start a book because you hear it’s good. You don’t remember who told you or what they said about it. But you come across the title when you’re loading up for your next big reading binge.
Then you see it’s a trilogy and you think, why not? I haven’t been sleeping much, anyway. This will fill the dark hours of winter when I can’t get my blanket just right to keep the chill from the leaky window off my shoulder. This will keep my face warm by Kindle-light, staving off the promise of nightmares that don’t end when sleep does finally whisper me out of this dystopian, misogynist reality. After all, some days it seems no written world can be darker than the one I’m living in.
If you’ve ever felt despair creeping in from all sides and long to escape in a good book, then you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Sometimes you start a book really knowing nothing about it, expecting nothing, just hoping it’ll be a reprieve. Maybe it’ll give you back the hope you’re struggling to find in the world you’re living in. Maybe it will be the opposite of the horror you imagined but were afraid to write when you were younger, because what if writing it made it come true? And here it was, true anyway?
Well, Olivie Blake crafted The Atlas Trilogy, and it has been a gift. It’s both darker and more hopeful than anything you might be imagining. It’s queer. It’s white. It’s brown. It understands and speaks to the messiness of life and the complication of ambition. Blake, a first-generation American writer, took magic and science and combined them with lust and power in ways that were predictable and shocking. She delivered well-developed characters who were both likable and loathsome, and who kept me reading chapter after chapter, book after book. Blake made me feel.
I did a deep dive into her ancestry after reading a passage in which a minority character’s experience is presented against a white character’s. (We are from very different places, and none of her bios directly claim her ancestry beyond stating she is first-gen. That’s a choice I’m recognizing here.)
Trusting, and trustworthy, characters
The Atlas Six was one of the best character studies I’ve ever read. I think the trilogy as a whole is an amazing feat in that it is coherent, follows through on its plot lines, and doesn’t lose the reader despite its massive scope. The story is riveting. It remains engaging throughout. The characters are a vast tapestry. I read all the books back-to-back, every night, until sleep finally came. They were an escape and a gift.
And, yes, they were bleak. These characters were horrible to each other, but in ways we can learn from. I definitely have untrustworthy people in my life, and I learned they were untrustworthy by making the mistake of trusting them over and over. But most people can be trusted. And I think the characters in this book could have learned a lot from risking trust.
A writing exercise
As an exercise, let’s reflect on what it’s like to be trusted. Think about when someone is vulnerable enough to allow you in. What is that like for you? How does that strengthen your bond? Is there a specific moment you can remember that exemplifies the trust between you two? Write about that as it happened, or as you wish it could or would have happened.
For 15 minutes, let trust win. Explore a trust that goes both ways.
Afterward, take five minutes to describe how this writing made you feel. Did it bring anything up for you? Is it something you’ll come back to? Why or why not?
If this book sounds intriguing to you, consider preordering your own copy of The Atlas Trilogy at Bookshop.org (or purchasing the three books separately) and supporting independent bookstores across the U.S.
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