Title: Alone With You in the Ether
Author: Olivie Blake
Audiobook Length: 9 hours and 57 minutes
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Genre: Fiction, Contemporary, Romance, Literary Fiction
Read Start Date: August 23, 2023
Read Finish Date: August 28, 2023
Brief Summary of the Plot from Goodreads: CHICAGO, SOMETIME—
Two people meet in the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist, undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. By the end of the story, these things will still be true. But this is not a story about endings.
For Regan, people are predictable and tedious, including and perhaps especially herself. She copes with the dreariness of existence by living impulsively, imagining a new, alternate timeline being created in the wake of every rash decision.
To Aldo, the world feels disturbingly chaotic. He gets through his days by erecting a wall of routine: a backbeat of rules and formulas that keep him going. Without them, the entire framework of his existence would collapse.
For Regan and Aldo, life has been a matter of resigning themselves to the blueprints of inevitability—until the two meet. Could six conversations with a stranger be the variable that shakes up the entire simulation?
My Review: I wasn’t particularly in love with Blake’s book The Atlas Six (you can find my review here), and so had decided not to read the other books in that series. However, I figured I would give Blake as an author another shot, and so picked up Alone With You in the Ether from the library as an audiobook. I had no idea what it was about, other than it topped the “popular” charts at the Vienna library.
In reading the book, my mood was constantly at status quo. I neither loved, nor hated the book. I didn’t feel much of anything about it, really…it was more something to listen to in order to pass the time. I did become annoyed from time to time at the different voices in the audiobook version, as Blake had some weird “narrator” POV that popped up sporadically and only for a sentence of two to describe to the reader the backstory of what was happening at that moment.
Some people absolutely love this book, like Ary and Books. I believe the review even mentions that Ary and Books bought multiple editions.
“the relationship (Regan & Aldo) in this book is another reason I am still mentally brainrottingly obsessed over it. Their connection is so beautiful and so deep, I loved both of them dearly throughout, but together it was a wild, heart wrenching, beautiful love. I felt through the whole book that I was fighting for them, fighting with them.”
Ary and Books
For me, Aldo and Regan (pronounced Reegan not Raygan) were not particularly enjoyable/likeable characters, and their “love” story was more like watching two trains barreling at full speed toward each other. You know they are going to crash and burn, which is not something you really want to witness, but somehow you can’t look away either.
From all the reviews of this book that I have read, it seems that you either love this book or don’t. I am sorry to say that I fell into the category of don’t.
Stats: My three star rating is below the average rating for this book, which on September 8, 2023 is 3.91 stars.
Recommended? Given that my 3 star rating is below the average for this book, and that other people absolutely love it, I can neither recommend, nor not recommend this book. You will have to judge for yourself :).
The Legal Alien 