Or “She is in all of his spaces and all of his thoughts. He contemplates formulas and degrees of rationality and they all turn into her. He thinks about time, which has only recently begun, or at least now feels different. He thinks: the Babylonians were wrong; time is made of her.” 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. Blake aims for grand phrasing of emotions that land quite impactfully and, sure, it may be overwrought at times but that's exactly how obsessive love feels. I love the way it spirals through the stratosphere or seems to be tumbling out of control or even trails off mid-thought because it so lucidly captures untethered emotions (and intrusive thoughts, which are constantly present in this book). There is a musicality to it, but it is like every instrument in a band trying to all take a solo at once in the cacophony of feeling so much you aren’t sure if you can contain it. It is art, pure and simple. Aldo’s mother, a lively Dominican girl too young for motherhood and too beautiful to stay long in one place, had never been very present. If she had ever asked anything from the universe, Aldo imagined she’d probably gotten what she wished.

Alone With You in the Ether Paperback – 20 June 2020 Alone With You in the Ether Paperback – 20 June 2020

i know it says a love story on the front, but this book is very much about mental health + choosing to not be medicated for mental health conditions. it was a hard read for me, but a very impactful one. and olivie blake just is just such a talented author and the sentences she is able to string together, about really dark and hard to talk about things, really resonated with me in a way other words just never have before. Alone With You In The Ether is one of the best romances I’ve read in a long time and I will continue to think about it for a long time. It’s a truly underrated book that I want to recommend to everyone I know. It’s a book that made me think deeply about love, life, time, and art. It’s a literary romance in the best sense of the word and because it is a romance novel, there is a happy ending, or as happy as it could be given the personalities of the characters. But it is a happy ending. Regan’s art exhibit was so cliché that I couldn’t believe it. Really? We’re going in this direction? This is the big finale? How basic! This book was set up to be so much more than that— so much edgier than that— what happened?! How did we end up in Live, Laugh, Love territory?THE NARRATOR, AN AGING, ARTHRITIC MAN IN POSSESSION OF MANY BOOKS: We interrupt your perusal of Aldo Damiani’s intrusive thoughts to provide some necessary academic insight. The great Kurt Gödel, a twentieth-century logician and friend of Albert Einstein, believed that a continuous trajectory of “light cones” toward the future meant that one could always return to the same point in space-time. It is Aldo Damiani’s essential thesis that these cones travel methodically, perhaps even predictably, along hexagonal paths. I’m sorry I keep changing my rating, I just genuinely can’t decide what to rate this. I like it more than my other 2 star reads though)

Alone with You in the Ether - Macmillan

Blake delivers seemingly effortless storytelling that loops through exciting metafiction techniques, such as a whole host of narrators intruding in on the story in part 1, including an “overzealous Cubs fan,” or “an aging, arthritic man in possession of many books” as well as stage direction details. It ushers us into the narrative with a fun and frenetic cinematic energy. I would have enjoyed it if Blake continued this style more through the book as I missed it, but once the characters are established it instead turns more inward as they attempt to have more of a harness on their own narratives. The perspective rotates between Regan and Aldo, offering both internal and external perspectives on each other creating more dynamic characters but also allowing us to detect inconsistencies that show how a self-image is often a slight fiction. This is particularly true for Regan who ‘ was most comfortable when she was at her falsest. Regan did not enjoy honesty, she hated it, was repulsed by it and by her own truths especially,’ and the way the readers perceptions on Regan morph over the course of the book—and with new revelations on her life—emphasizes the way a person seems always in flux. 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. these two loving and understanding each other was everything. the book did not sugar coat their mental health struggles. they were both dealing with a lot when they met, and the realistic portrayal of mental health was very much appreciated. these challenges don’t just go away. but learning and accepting them, as well as helping each other is key. I wish all the metaphors from the first half could’ve actually meant something in the end, spoiler alert! They didn’t.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. I will not understand how this book is classified as a romance when it felt like a horror story in my eyes. Following two vulnerable and flawed characters who come together to form a deeply unhealthy, sex-addicted, codependent relationship, this book left me baffled that people can romanticize and idealize the relationship between Aldo and Regan when I was actively rooting for them to separate and seek help. Their personalities had two or three distinct traits and little to nothing else to cling onto, as a reader, as we meander throughout their relationship that seems all consuming to them, but, as an outsider, deeply confused me because they speak for hours on hand but manage to say nothing in the process. Their connection is superficial and deeply obsessive (they both don’t have a single friend and barely reach out to their family because they are all consumed by each other), and it concerns me that their ending connection feels like a triumph when they are not in a good place to be in a relationship.