aldo and regan are so made for each other. their conversations, their humour, their minds fit perfectly together like a puzzle piece. While this book isn't necessarily a romance for me, its been a long time since I felt so connected to the characters AND the connection between them. They're so special to me. Their connection is so special to me. The way they love each other, the way they know each other ahhsjajajjak I am utterly, wholly, completely ruined by this book and aldoregan.

Alone With You in the Ether: A love story like no other and a Alone With You in the Ether: A love story like no other and a

Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it is violent? Can you love it even when it does not love me The premise is rather cute with Aldo and Regan agreeing to have six conversations to see what they learn about each other, something right in Aldo’s wheelhouse as ‘ for Aldo, to love something was to study it; to devote every spare thought to understanding it.’ Yet there is a darkness lurking just beneath, something that might not be immediately evident in the blinding glare of meet-cutes and warm infatuation but still casts shadows they choose to find intriguing instead of alarming. Though Blake does capture the way in the falling-hard stage you tend to feel everything reminds you of that person, akin to learning a new word and seeing it everywhere: From Olivie Blake, the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six, comes a literary, intimate study of time, space, and the nature of love. Alone with You in the Ether explores what it means to be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as if you're not broken.Regan and Aldo fall into something far beyond existential, beyond the quantum physics Aldo obsesses over. They fall deeply into each other. There was something about 'Alone With You in the Ether' that drew me in, tangled me in its abyss, trapped in the world of these two complex characters. There’s even a point in the novel where they have a fight and Regan has thoughts of stabbing Aldo, her family, and herself, all because she cannot have a man that she is literally addicted to because she puts all her value as a human being into one other person. Um…. Are we going to act like that’s okie dokie? Alone With You in the Ether plays with narrative structure and linear time to weave a story of two broken people crashing together like comets, and we, as audience, are witness to their glorious destruction." — Tor.com 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: A love story like no other and a

If you’re looking for a book you will want to talk about for a long time (and have plenty of people to talk to about it), The Atlas Six is it.”— Buzzfeed 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. I couldn’t bring myself to care even a little bit no matter how hard I tried. 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.”If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces.’ There was nothing worse than being predictable. Nothing smaller than feeling ordinary. Nothing more disappointing than being reminded she was both. 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. From the no. 1 international bestselling author of The Atlas Six. 'Olivie Blake is a mind-blowing talent' - Chloe Gong 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?