Potentially unpopular opinion forthcoming: I didn’t think The Atlas Six was all that great. There is little plot; not much happens in detail except time passing and people wondering what is going on with {insert current person and/or situation of concern here}. Not much happens with characters either; what is {person} hiding from the group and/or themselves? What is being hidden from them that might possibly matter? There is also not a lot of world building; this is a world in which there is magic and magic education, which matters a bit to the scenario of the whole story, but very little about how the magic system works, how society with magic functions, how education and magic are combined, who has the magic, etc.
Overall, this is The Hunger Games and The Magicians told in the style of The Secret History. Six young-ish powerful magic users are recruited by the mysterious Atlas to become essentially post-grads at the Alexandrian Society, which is apparently what used to be called the Library of Alexandria (ancient massive library, supposedly destroyed), but only 5 of them will be invited to become members. Personalities clash, secrets abound, alliances/betrayals come and go, and no one seems to know what’s going on except maybe Atlas, and he’s certainly not telling. Libby’s the one without much confidence in her strength (but she’s definitely better than Nico!), Nico (Libby’s arch-nemesis) is Mr Perfect never has to work at anything (both he and Libby can manipulate matter), Parisa is the pretty one who uses sex to get what she wants (telepath), Reina is the sullen anti-social-ish one (controls plants), Callum has less personality than anyone else but is largely disliked and avoided because he’s an empath (can and does manipulate emotions), and Tristan spends a good chunk of the story working out what exactly is it that he can do (and everyone else is wondering about this too, again except maybe Atlas); Tristan is the mysterious one with an unhappy backstory, except that everyone seems to have some kind of tragic something or other in their past.
Add to the mix a handful of outside characters with connections to the six candidates (Nico’s roomie/bestie Gideon), Liby’s boyfriend Ezra, and Atlas’ assistant (?) Dalton, and their potential connections and secrets, and that’s about it.
If it sounds like the story is almost a big list of characters to which information is added bouncing around from person to person, that’s because that’s basically the whole novel; the frame of the academic/magic contest doesn’t really get going until the very end, and TBH, the cliff-hanger isn’t really even that interesting because there’s nowhere for it to go that I really care to follow because there’s so little plot or world, and no one is interesting enough for me to really care.
I can appreciate some of the potential connections being set up for the rest of the trilogy, but there’s just not enough actual concrete anything for me to care enough to keep going.