Alone with You in the Ether by Olivie Blake
I recently finished Olivie Blake’s Alone with You in the Ether, one of my most anticipated reads this October. However, it was such a slow read for me, and I struggled to finish it. I found it so difficult to connect with the story and the characters. I kept hoping that the story would eventually turn around and pull me in, but it never did. I was genuinely excited to read this book after seeing all the glowing reviews on Goodreads, but unfortunately, I ended up disappointed. I even caught myself wondering a few times if I was reading the same book everyone was raving about because no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t appreciate it 🥲
Well, it happens sometimes. The same book that moved one person to tears might not resonate the same way with someone else, and that’s perfectly okay. That’s what makes reading so special, the way each book speaks a little differently to the heart of every bookworm that opens its pages 💖
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?