8 Aug 2024

Book Review / Alone with you in the Ether by Olivie Blake


 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?

Published:  20th June 2020
Publisher:  Tor Books
Goodreads : Click Here
Series or Stand-Alone:  Stand-Alone
Source:  Bought
Genres:     Romance, Fiction, Contemporary and Literary Fiction
Pages:  288 pages, Hardcover 




MY REVIEW


What I liked about this story...  For me, the best part was the romance and drama between Regan and Aldo.  From the moment they met right through until the very last page I just couldn't stop reading to find out what was going to happen and how they were both going to react in certain situations.  There's a few hard hitting subject lines covered in this story and I feel that was covered really well alongside the love aspect.  

What I didn't like about this story...  I felt a bit lost at times during this story and I don't think it was the plot.  The story was very beautifully written but at times the writing seemed too dense for what was happening in the story.  It was a very slow read for that reason and I had wished that the pace was faster.  

Would I recommend...  Absolutely.  Such a hauntingly beautiful story.  If you are not keen on dense writing that makes the story read slow, maybe this is not the story for you, but worth a go.  




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