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 beginning might confuse you and might leave you scratching your head but godddd, this story was so beautiful. 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.

Told through prose that has passages so ethereally gorgeous it could only exist in service of love and with a dual narrative that threads their lives together, Alone With You in the Ether is a gorgeously interior and intimate portrait of difficult love that we can’t help but dive into even if it is destined to burn us down to ash as Blake’s storytelling beautifully cuts right into the troubled heart of matters as deeply as she cut into the heart of the reader. Olivie Blake is the internationally bestselling author of The Atlas Six, Alone with You in the Ether, One For My Enemy, and Masters of Death. She chases highs, she is assailed by intrusive thoughts (some violent), she is her own worst enemy and both she and Aldo fear she is using their relationship as a fix instead of truly working on herself. About the Author: Olivie Blake is the internationally bestselling author of The Atlas Six, Alone with You in the Ether, One For My Enemy, and Masters of Death. This was so beautiful, so heart-wrenching, and not to sound corny on main but I feel like a new person after reading this perfection.While family is gathered, children playing, and everyone being merry, this book came to me like a gift, packaged with elements of raw, unadulterated beauty. the book has six parts, and each part had it’s own voice and pacing that distinguished itself from the rest. 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.

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. A glimpse into a joining of hearts and minds as Aldo and Charlotte meet and fall ever deeper into love.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. Art is loss,’ she muses, ‘ it’s the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes. This was my first Olivie Blake and I will certainly read others, it is a book without any fantastical elements though still is undeniably magical. Alone With You in the Ether by Olivie Blake is a glimpse into the nature of love, and how to face the fractures of yourself. 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.

There exists a maxim that love transcends all, and Olivie Blake has finely crafted a fragile, fiery love affair that transcends even her characters to become a sensual romance between art and science.the narrative definitely gives off the vibe that its trying too hard, not to mention how inconsistent it is in a few different ways. It is certainly a literary work, and all the heady topics of time theory and reflections and analysis of art are handled in accessible yet ponderous ways that are folded productively into the larger themes of the book. The author went overboard trying to make the story and the characters seem deep and complex, and it turned out unbearably pretentious, tedious, overwritten, and straight-out boring instead. She says so at some point - that if she was on medication still, she couldn't/wouldn't have loved Aldo.

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.

Many will disagree with me on this and that's ok but let me just say that what is painted as her vulnerability and uniqueness in this story just came across as manipulative and dependant for me.