Atlas – The Story of Pa Salt
Lucinda Riley
784 pages
MacMillan
Published May 11, 2023
✨✨✨✨
This is the eighth and final book in the bestselling Seven Sisters series, about a family of young women who were all adopted by a mysterious billionaire as babies, and named for the stars of the Pleiades constellation. I’ve read them all in order in the last two years, and enjoyed some more than others. The series was supposed to end with The Missing Sister, but the author, who was battling advanced cancer by this stage, realised the story was not complete, so entrusted her plot outline and notes for a final book about Atlas, the father, to her son, so he could publish it after she died. You definitely need to have read the earlier books to understand this one, which brings back characters from all of them – as it was I struggled to remember who everyone was and how the past characters connected with the modern ones.
Rescued as a young boy from the streets of Paris after fleeing Russia in 1928, Atlas is adopted into the family of famous sculptor Paul Landowski, but remains fearful that his former friend, Kreeg Ezsu, who has sworn to kill him, will track him down, so refuses to speak, and takes the name Bo. He meets a young girl, Elle, in an orphanage and they develop a close friendship which deepens into love as they grow up. When his past threatens to catch up with him, Bo and Elle run away, first to Leipzig, and then onto various countries where they meet and are helped by characters from the previous books. In 2008, Pa Salt’s seven daughters and their new partners and old allies embark on the cruise to the Aegean to lay a wreath for him. Given his diary to read, they will finally learn the reasons for the secrecy that has surrounded them all their lives, and the fate of their beloved adoptive father.
I have very mixed feelings about this whole series, and this book. Romance novels bore me silly, but the historical aspects and inclusion of real people from the past kept me reading, and the need to know just what it was all about. The plots are contrived, formulaic and nonsensical, the writing repetitive and the dialogue painfully awkward. Atlas is basically a coward for most of the book, his only heroic actions occurring when he’s given up on life anyway so doesn’t care if he dies. The suspense is created by people keeping secrets their whole lives for terrible reasons, and failures of communication lead to one tragedy after another. There are plot holes you could bury Atlas’s giant superyacht in, ridiculous character names which are anagrams of Greek deities without anyone ever noticing, and plays on words which only work in English and ignore the fact that most characters would be communicating in French.
Despite all this, I tore through this in a couple of days, and thoroughly enjoyed the drama, the various revelations of who everyone is and how they all connect, and the happy endings for those who deserve them. I could’ve done with more of a summary of each of the previous books, in particular a family tree showing how each modern heroine connected to the past one – maybe it’s assumed one has the time to reread them all? This book was much better than The Missing Sister, and Whittaker has worked hard to tie up all the loose ends and reveal the fate of all the minor characters as well as the main ones. If you accept that all the outlandish coincidences and minor supernatural elements are the work of Destiny, and just go with it, this is a fitting end to the series.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Sharing is caring!
Leave a Reply