The Atlas series continues to be frustrating but not without merit. For every eye-roll ("But its hot and I am le tired") and baffling moment ("He'd never understood British currency"), there's a beat of fun dialogue ("I might actually like you" "Don't worry, [i]t'll pass.") and a tug on the heartstrings ("Did you really think I could only love you if your hands were clean?").  As always, we see the shapes of intriguing ethical questions and interpersonal dynamics but their foundations are so wobbly that they often fizzle out into a paragraph of internal monologue that sounds pretty but says very little.

If you make it through those paragraphs, however, this final installment does deliver on the drama -

Parisa's mixed mourning of her husband, Dalton's Parisa doll,  Nico's heart-to-heart with Libby about finding each other in any universe and his subsequent death, Callum shooting Dalton, Libby almost shooting Callum, Tristan's dad actually shooting Callum

. I can't promise the emotions will be satisfying or even completely clear, but they will be heightened. And kinda horny.

What I really want to talk about is the acknowledgements. 

In the part of the book most people use to thank their cats, Blake sets fire to authorly mystique and tells us exactly what she's been trying to show us for three books: 
 

Reading this took the teeth out of my gripes with the series. The characters' extreme apathy is easier to bear knowing they're supposed to be avatars for how an unjust world makes you want to throw up your hands. I can make my peace with flimsy plot and worldbuilding with this confirmation that they were never meant to be more than vehicles for the Romance. Maybe all that style-over-substance rumination is like that not because of pretentiousness but a consequence of how hard it is to grapple with apathy and our own insignificance and come out with anything clear and meaningful.

The Atlas trilogy, weighed down by its ponderous flaws, is more of an imprint of the emotional highs and lows I was hoping for than the real things but that imprint is more intriguing and daring than many a more coherent story. I'm grateful Blake had the courage and discipline to try and personify some of the big, harrowing questions of our time in six of the worst classmates you could possibly imagine.