Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt by Lucinda Riley and Harry Whittaker

Description from Amazon:

Maia, Ally, Star, CeCe, Tiggy, Electra and their long-lost missing sister are gathered together for the first time, on board the Titan, to say a final goodbye to the enigmatic father they loved so dearly.

He has entrusted each of them with a clue to their past. But for every truth revealed another question emerges. How did Pa Salt amass his fortune? Why did he choose to adopt the sisters and why were they chosen from such different parts of the world? Have the answers been there all along, if only they had known where to find them?

The sisters must confront the idea that their adored father was someone they barely knew – and, even more shockingly, that his long-buried secrets may still echo through the generations today.

 

Oh how I wanted to love this book and it’s binding of the parts, but alas.

There are two feelings about this: one is that an explanation was given for each sister and the reason for Atlas’s run was clarified. But the other is complete incredulity at what the reader is supposed to swallow.

 

So Atlas has a diary that pretty much laid it out, and where entries were missing over the years, he summarized it later. It explains his start and about the kind people who adopted him. After travelling nearly 6,000kms from Siberia to France on his own, with something very valuable around his neck, as an eight-year-old boy. Um… wow… Then we move through his childhood where he refuses to speak to protect himself from someone after him (and the people around him all seem to feel he wants to tell them something but are quite happy to wait years for it) but manages to prove his extraordinary violin-playing ability. He also meets the love of his life. At eleven years old. Fast forward and a series of amazing links to the next countries drag him along, all while he is in fear of the person who might be just behind him.

 

Now bear in mind that this diary is being read by the sisters on the boat. Dear old Georg couldn’t just summarise what happened and tell them. Nope, each had to have a copy of the diary, go off and read it on their own, and not read any further than where they would stop for the day. A tad unrealistic. Fair enough, the relationships that get revealed within the diary are quite interesting and how people who worked for Atlas came to be. And we won’t (cough cough) focus on the bow and arrow or what aided in the mine in Australia.

 

Then we go through all the ways he adopted the girls and there are tons of parts in it that make no sense and don’t drive the story forward. Why he would go to certain places and see certain people seems like padding for nothing in a book already far too long. This could have been culled in so many places and dialogue made to sound much more natural.

 

But then the ending... oh my word. Worst villain ever. And worst villain’s son who is also a villain ever.

 

So yay that the girls got their origin story and learned how they fitted together as well as understanding the backstories to those aligned with Atlas. But gosh... I was disappointed in it.