Alone With You in the Ether: A love story like no other and a Heat Magazine Book of the Week

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the moment i read the last paragraph of this book, i thought ah, i would never find a book like this. How is that in the same book as “If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces. This is a love story, but not a love story, because it's complex, it shatters, it sometimes has jagged edges, which gives everything life. Alone with You in the Ether explores what it means to be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as if you're not broken. The prose is quite engaging and this is a much faster paced novel than I tend to read so I was gripped the whole way through.

i was meandering through the reviews on this and found some of the popular ones describing how this was glamorizing deteriorating mental health, etc. i don’t know how it is to anyone else, if it’s aggressively unrelatable or boring or weirdly paced, so don’t listen to me.But most notably, this sashaying of perspectives is like a needle threading the two together until, at the end, we witness them as a seamless whole viewed from the outside with a conversation entirely narrated of he said and she said instead of a duality of perspective. this is kinda a side note but this book takes place in chicago and that alone can be a five star read for me, but my point is that olivie blake describes chicago so accurately that only a person who has lived here could ever do. I wasn't able to connect at all for the better part of the first two chapters and then they went to the church and to say I ascended during that scene would be an understatement. Alone With You in the Ether finds Regan and Aldo caught in each other’s gravitational attraction of love, a love that scorches through them and their physical selves to expose their very essences as forces navigating either by emotion or logic.

and even though i have some issues with the narrative structure and style, i did find some parts of it to be inspiring. for me, it had me fascinated from the third page, then almost shoved me out into another breakdown and had me so so stressed the whole time just to pull me back at the last minute, and at the end i’m still confused. the book has six parts, and each part had it’s own voice and pacing that distinguished itself from the rest. At many points, Regan is truly manic (not in the funny personality sense but as in DSM criteria mania sense), makes questionable personal decisions, commits a criminal act (this is never really addressed) and shapes her world entirely around Aldo and how him being a genius and wanting her somehow elevated her personal value.This is what I get when I go into a book expecting it to become a new favorite based on the synopsis and glowing reviews.

Olivie Blake—a pen name of chosen through a name generator—began her career writing fan fiction and self-publishing novels until going viral on social media landed her a book deal with Tor and the recognition she certainly deserves.

She copes with the dreariness of existence by living impulsively, imagining a new, alternate timeline being created in the wake of every rash decision. But in the blazing glory of their initial infatuations we see clear into them and the very essence of their beings, with Regan representative of art and Aldo representative of science. how the characters were viewed in an omniscient way; all their cracks and flaws laid out for us to comprehend. Regan is a fascinating character, one who is certainly flawed and can be rather frustrating at times but you want her to learn to love herself for herself and not because someone else does. This is, ultimately, a literary romance, one with grit and uncomfortable explorations into themes of mental health, co-dependency, compulsive self-sabotage and the ways the veil of illusion begins to slip as relationships progress and we must decide to crack or embrace that ‘ it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.