Book title: Alone with you in the ether
Author: Olivie Blake
Pages: 262
Genre: Romance Fiction
Authors website: find her here
Independently published
Alone with you in the ether book summary
CHICAGO, SOMETIME—Two people meet in the armory of 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, life is a finish line of mutually assured disappointment. Her method of coping with the dreariness of existence is to project herself into imagined multipotency, spinning new threads of destiny with every impulsive decision she makes. For Aldo, life is a plague of constancy–a structure of rules and formulas that keep him going, without which the entire frame of his existence would collapse.
For both of them, life is a matter of resigning themselves to the blueprints of inevitability, until six conversations with a stranger form the variable that glitches the entire simulation.
Who should read Alone with you in the ether?
If you’re looking for a new adult contemporary fiction romance to jump into then I would suggest reading Alone with you in the ether. It tells a love story of two individuals who are the complete opposites of each other.
Quotes
“So when people say we’re alone in the ether?” “Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.”
“Aldo,” Regan said, “what’s the ether?” “It’s what people used to believe the universe was filled with,” he said. “They believed light needed to pass through something, only Einstein proved light can be particles, which don’t need a medium to travel through. And before that,” he added, ” ether was what they called the air in the realm of the gods. A shining, fluid substance.” “So when people say were alone in the ether…?” “Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.”
Now I won’t lie, It took me a long minute to get into this book. There’s this obsession Aldo has with bees and hexagons and he talks about it a lot. Which I tried so hard to understand because I thought it was going to be more prominent in the story.
Cozy up to these love story reviews:
Pros
The dialogue
The pacing of the book
It isn’t your ordinary love story- a super unique POV of two individuals who are so used to doing something one way and attempting to change that for the person they love.
Cons
There are so many metaphors throughout the book that I felt like sometimes took away from following the story.
Could just be me but I couldn’t connect with the characters and their motives or why they did something. I felt like I was on the outside looking in rather than feeling the story play out. You know when you read something- you can put yourself in that world
This didn’t feel like that.
Insight on characters from the author
In the afterword, Olivie Blake shares how she wrote the characters, specifically Regan and it made me see Reagan in a different light.
Olivie Blake wrote Reagan as this messy character who does things on impulse and her actions are a result of her bipolar disorder which Olivie Blake expresses she herself has.
So when I read that I felt more compassion than I initially did.
But it still threw me off at times.
What is the theme of Alone with you in the ether?
Love
Is there any romance alone with you in the ether?
Yes between Aldo and Reagan.
Reagan does sleep around even though she’s in a relationship or was in a relationship with her ex.
Not an ex but someone who she hooks up with because he is the only one who understands her and her mind. Until Aldo that is.
Alone with you in the ether character list and guide:
Rinaldo aka Aldo-
Italian/Dominican. He is a professor who is also getting his doctorate in theoretical math. He takes pills and smokes pot here and there to help his mental state. It wasn’t expressed what he has but I’m guessing some sort of autism maybe Asperger or social anxiety because it says he has trouble communicating. He is super analytical about life.
His mom left him and his father. His father worries about Aldo sometimes. They have a good relationship since it has always been the two of them
“Sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for something that will never happen,” he said. “Like I’m just existing from day to day but will never really matter. I get up in the morning because I have to, because I have to do something or I’m just wasting space, or because if I don’t answer the phone my dad will be alone. But it’s an effort, it takes work. I have to tell myself, every day, to get up. Get up, do this, move like this, talk to people, be normal, try to be social, be nice, be patient. On the inside, I just feel like, I don’t know, nothing. Like I’m just an algorithm that someone put in place.”
Charlotte Regan aka Regan–
Chinese/ Irish. She is a tour guide in an art museum.
She hooks up with random guys even though she is in a relationship? Or a situation-ship.
She is bipolar and has depression.
“The thing about pills, Regan wanted to say to the doctor who had clearly never taken any, was that the ups and downs still happened; they were just different now, contained within brackets of limitation. Some inner lawlessness was still there, screeching for a higher high and clawing for a lower low, but ultimately the pills were loose restraints, a method of numbly shrinking”
Marc-
Reagan’s boyfriend. Or the guy she’s with. Because they’re hooking up but he made a comment about Reagan having a crush on Aldo. Saying he wouldn’t mind if Reagan and Aldo hooked up because she “needs to get him out of her system”
Relationships
One of the reasons why I couldn’t really get into the love romance between Aldo and Regan is because of how Regan treated all her relationships.
As I said above I learned in the end that she is bipolar, I kind of picked it up too when she had her internal thoughts monologue. It took up almost 2 pages and It felt like rambling.
I, too, ramble but this felt more heavy.
I didn’t get the vibe that Regan was in love with Aldo at all. To me it felt like she was intrigued that he was different from most of the guys she’s been with- and she treated him like a challenge. Like it was a game for her to get him to fall in love with her. Which he did.
Like she “needed” him just to feel accomplished.
And from Aldo’s perspective, even though she was so completely opposite from everything he was- he was willing to compromise. Even his dad said Regan would destroy him because his mother was the same way. And she left.
“For Aldo, to love something was to study it; to devote every spare thought to understanding it.”
Even Though I didn’t feel like this was a love story for both characters, I think Olivie Blake has done a wonderful job depicting in words every thought that went on in their heads.
I would Recommend Alone with you in the Ether
I would recommend this book to anyone who could relate to Regan-
In this video, Olivie Blake explains to the reader she’s writing to around the 4:00 mark
“ I was just trying to tap into that feeling of- I’m just not interested in my own health. I’m not interested in myself. I don’t think I deserve good things. I don’t understand how I could ever change. And that’s the person I’m writing to”
Olivie Blake
It’s all about perspectives and I really enjoyed this book but sometimes it just didn’t feel like a love story to me. and there were other times it did.
The characters are definitely complex which I found a nice change of pace from previous books I’ve read. And they aren’t stagnant, they grow throughout the book.
So I would recommend Alone with you in the Ether to anyone interested in a short romance read. I think you could read it as a weekend book or in one day if you wanted to.
I loved it because even though there were times I was confused, I loved that Alone with you in the ether isn’t your typical love story. It shows the ugly in relationships when one person doesn’t work on themselves. But then it shows the beauty of doing something you normally wouldn’t do for the person you love. and what it means to love a person.
If you want to check out the post I made previous regarding these two books then read here
