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58 pages 1 hour read

Olivie Blake

The Atlas Paradox

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

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Character Analysis

Libby Rhodes

As a physicist, Libby Rhodes can manipulate the elements. She was one of the most powerful medeians in her class at the New York University of Magical Arts (NYUMA), along with Nico. At the end of the first book, Libby is abducted from the Society grounds, and throughout the entirety of this book she’s trying to get back to her own time. Libby spends this entire time in 1989-1990 in Los Angeles, California, putting together a plan to get herself back to her own time. Of all the characters, Libby’s journey is the most pronounced—one part of her arc is the literal journey to return to her own time.

However, her character arc also involves development and growth, leading to a total transformation. When Libby Rhodes joined the Alexandrian Society in the first novel, she was an anxious person who never felt that she was good enough. She was also the most compassionate of the initiates and would never put her needs above those of someone else. The other initiates recognize that “she had established herself as the ‘but’ in their collective conscience, their measure of morality,” as Reina puts it (26).

By the end of this second novel, through her ordeal of being imprisoned in a different time, Libby has changed. She first shows this shift in her willingness to use Belen for her own purposes, even though she knows that, by misleading her, she’s affecting Belen’s entire career. When she fully accepts her own power, Libby becomes willing to effectively set off an atomic bomb in the deserts of Nevada, affecting generations of people with fallout, in order to get home. When Libby at last returns to the Alexandrian Society, she shows that she has truly changed—she has become more selfish, more willing to sacrifice others for her own purposes. Upon her return, her first act is one of vengeance against Ezra. With this act, Libby’s transformation is complete, and she has become a murderer, completely suspending her previous role as the conscience of the initiates.

Nico de Varona

Like Libby, Nico de Varona is a physicist who attended NYUMA. Unlike Libby, however, Nico is charming and charismatic, and he depends on this to get along with the other initiates. However, he lacks the maturity of the other initiates. Even at the end of their two years at the Society, he’s still trying to create a camaraderie that no one else is interested in pursuing, exemplified by his desire for a formal presentation of their work and a final goodbye dinner which no one else wants to attend.

In the previous book, Nico befriends Reina, who becomes his sparring partner. However, at the beginning of this book, his projection of Reina makes clear to her that he sees her as weak and predictable. She cuts her friendship with him, but Nico, characteristically, doesn’t understand why and tries to fall back on his charisma to charm her back into his life.

Although he and Libby irritate each other, Nico understands that Libby is integral to his power—their powers are enhanced by each other, and he struggles after Libby disappears. Before her disappearance, they were working together, using their powers to try to open wormholes. Without Libby, Nico depends on his friendship with Gideon—to whom he can speak only in dreams—to keep himself grounded. Although Nico’s character doesn’t transform as much as some of the others during the course of the novel, his relationship with Gideon does come into focus for him. At the end, when Nico and Gideon reunite in France, they kiss and move from friendship into a deeper relationship. In addition, Libby reunites with them, and the narrative conveys the sense that Nico’s world has been fully put back together.

Tristan Caine

The son of a famous underground criminal boss, Adrian Caine, Tristan Caine is from London. His father is a witch, meaning that he never attended a magical university, and it’s important to Tristan that he transcend his origins and rise in social status. His engagement to Eden Wessex and work at Wessex Corp. illustrate his successful ascension of the social ladder, yet he still feels like an outsider, which informs the theme of Outsiders Looking for Belonging. He joins the Society initiates hoping that he’ll finally find the place where he belongs.

Tristan’s character arc revolves around the discovery and use of his power. While everyone else knows and understands their power, Tristan doesn’t. This lack of understanding is what led his father, in the past, to push him aside. However, in an ironic twist, when Tristan looks back on his childhood, he realizes that the first instances of his power manifested as a means to escape his father’s abuse. This understanding allows him to begin to work with his power and learn to safely access it. As the novel continues, it becomes clear that Tristan is, in fact, the most powerful medeian of them all; as Nico puts it, his power was “as close to divine as anything could possibly be” (140).

However, Tristan experiences terrible guilt over two events in the previous novel. First, he was selected by the rest of the initiates to kill Callum, specifically because of their close relationship. At the end of this novel, he admits to Callum that, with this act, he destroyed their relationship. In addition, he feels guilty about Libby’s disappearance—in one of the first instances that he used his powers, he could see past the animation of Libby’s dead body to know that it was fake. Tristan and Libby had sex and really connected in the first novel, and he feels guilty that she was abducted from under their noses and he couldn’t protect her.

At the novel’s end, Tristan decides to stay with Atlas and work with him at the library. He does so after realizing that his father is behind the attempts on his life. He wants to feel safe and protected—in other words, he’s looking for belonging, and is willing to work with Atlas and let him use his powers in exchange.

Parisa Kamali

A telepath, Parisa Kamali is also, according to everyone that sees her, the most beautiful woman they’ve ever seen. As a result, Parisa is accustomed to being underestimated, and she makes her way through life by using her beauty, along with her telepathy, to manipulate others. Also because of her telepathy, Parisa is a student of the human mind, and her studies at the Society center on Jung and psychology. In addition, she explores the library’s sentience, seeking to understand its interactions with the initiates.

Parisa quickly becomes involved with Dalton, their instructor at the Society. When she enters his mind, she discovers that Dalton, with Atlas’s help, has imprisoned a part of himself. Because of Parisa’s abilities, Atlas originally hoped to convince Parisa to stay and work with him. However, Parisa is smart and independent, and she isn’t interested in subjecting herself to Atlas and having her powers used for someone else’s agenda.

Throughout the novel, Parisa struggles to find meaning and purpose in life—and in her power. Because of her telepathic insight into others’ minds, she’s jaded about people’s purposes and motivations. She wants to find purpose in life but keeps returning to the conclusion that the universe is random and meaningless. In the end, this is what fuels her decision to leave the world behind and create a new one with Dalton.

Reina Mori

Because she’s a naturalist, Reina Mori can communicate with nature—she can literally hear the thoughts of plants. In addition, anything natural, including other people, can use her energy. People like her stepfather have tried to use her for her power and, as a result, she’s reserved and distant with everyone.

Reina is focused on her studies to the exclusion of forming relationships with her fellow initiates—the chance to access the texts in the Society’s library is the only reason she joined the Society in the first place. In the end, however, she does form a relationship with the most unlikely ally—Callum Nova. The purpose of this relationship, however, develops consistently with her character: She wants access, which Callum can give her, to the texts that the archives won’t give her.

Through her studies, Reina becomes preoccupied with the role of gods in creation. She becomes convinced, during her research, that the world is moving into a new era, in which medeians are becoming supreme beings, which forms the basis for one of the book’s main themes: A New Generation of Gods. As new gods, she thinks, they’ll fix the world and shepherd humans into a new era. In addition, she’s beginning to believe that “[t]he purpose of this Society should not simply be to contribute to the archives, […] It should be to bring the archives into the world” (291). With this belief, and her new willingness to accept the responsibility of her powers, Reina may become a serious player in the strategic game that Atlas and Ezra, among others, play in the final book of the trilogy.

Callum Nova

The way that Callum Nova acts—as if he doesn’t care about anything—belies that he’s an empath. He comes from the wealthy Nova family, which owns a media conglomerate, and his fellow initiates think of him as a disaffected rich boy who’s drinking his life away. During the initiation ceremony, however, it’s revealed that the reason Callum puts up barriers between himself and everyone else is that, as an empath, he feels everything too deeply and it literally saps his energy.

In addition, Callum shows further depth regarding Libby’s story arc. While Libby is trying to return to her own time, she hears many of the other initiates in her head—but Callum’s is the voice she hears most often, and at the end he’s the one who has done the calculations to figure out the amount of power Libby actually needs to get home.

He’s also the one who sees what’s really happening with Atlas, which becomes his independent study topic. Despite Callum’s best intentions to not become involved in the lives of the others, and despite being the one whom the others decided to kill, in some ways Callum is the most involved member of the group. During this second novel, although he pretends not to care, in the end, he forces Tristan to admit that he destroyed their relationship, and his anger fuels a plan, which isn’t yet revealed.

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