CHICAGO, SOMETIME—Two people meet in the armory of 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. After their meeting, those things do not change. Everything else, however, is slightly different. Both obsessive, eccentric personalities, Aldo Damiani and Charlotte Regan struggle to be without each other from the moment they meet. The truth—that he is a clinically depressed, anti-social theoretician and she is a manipulative liar with a history of self-sabotage—means the deeper they fall in love, the more troubling their reliance on each other becomes. An intimate study of time and space, ALONE WITH YOU IN THE ETHER is a fantasy writer’s magicless glimpse into the nature of love, what it means to be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as if you’re not broken
- Title: Alone with You in the Ether
- Author: Olivie Blake
- Publisher: Self-Published
- Publication Date: June 20, 2020
- Genre: Literary Fiction
- Targeted Age Range: Adult
- Content Warnings: mental illness, drug abuse, addiction, emotional abuse, infidelity, toxic relationship, gaslighting
Part literary fiction, part love story, Alone with You in the Ether might be in my top five favorite books of the year. I picked Alone with You in the Ether up for the first time in April in a buddy read with my dear friend Saima, and immediately after finishing it, knew that I’d want to reread and annotate it later. A couple months later, I did just that.
Olivie Blake’s Alone with You in the Ether follows Charlotte “Regan” Regan and Rinaldo ‘Aldo’ Damiani — two strangers who upon meeting at the Art Institute of Chicago decide to have six conversations, and ultimately, fall in love. It’s an exploration of self, of mental health, and what it truly means to love someone. The self-publication version calls it “ Alone with You in the Ether: A Love Story”, and at its very core, it is just that. This story is incredibly character driven, and really is focused on Regan and Aldo alone. However, I hesitate to call it a “romance”, simply because it isn’t lighthearted or soft like most other romances. In a way, I think that people who love Sally Rooney’s Normal People will also love Alone with You in the Ether.
Alone With You in the Ether is about two deeply flawed, broken kindred spirits finding each other. Initially, they think that love is what will save them — and while Alone With You in the Ether doesn’t discount the importance of love as a motivation for healing or a support, it does go to lengths to show that you can’t depend on someone’s love for your own happiness, or to fix you. Alone with You in the Ether is a hodgepodge of tender, bittersweet moments, and gut wrenching ones.
“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?”
Alone with You in the Ether is lyrical and beautiful, with messy, deeply flawed and nuanced characters. I loved reading about Aldo and Regan, but more specifically, I loved reading about their innermost thoughts, and how their minds worked. If I had to describe Alone With You in the Ether in one word, I would either choose “intimate”, “complex”, or “tender”. Alone With You in the Ether almost feels voyeuristic, at times — You’re so conscious of Aldo and Regan’s thoughts, their fears, their driving forces, the things that they’re too scared to tell anyone else but particularly the person they’re in love with. At times, I was a little frustrated with the two of them, but I think knowing so much about how they worked made it easier to relate, to empathize, and to root for the two of them.
The prose in Alone With You in the Ether is some of my favorite out there, although, it does teeter the line of pretentious and stunning at times. I will say that upon rereading, the writing style and structure made a lot of sense contextually and for these characters. I absolutely loved and cherished my reread of Alone with You in the Ether, and know this is a story I’ll be thinking about for years to come.
Links for Alone with You in the Ether: Goodreads | TheStoryGraph | Bookshop | IndieBound
Alexene Farol Follmuth, also known under the pen name Olivie Blake, is a lover and writer of stories, many of which involve the fantastic, the paranormal, or the supernatural, but not always. More often, her works revolve around the collective experience, what it means to be human (or not), and the endlessly interesting complexities of life and love.
Alexene tripped and fell into writing after abandoning her long-premeditated track for Optimum Life Achievement while attending law school, and now focuses primarily on the craft and occasional headache of creating fiction. Under her Olivie byline, New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling The Atlas Six released 2022 from Tor Books, to be followed by the sequel in October and the re-release of her viral literary romance Alone With You in the Ether in November. She has also been published as well as the writer for the graphic series Clara and the Devil and a variety of other books. As Alexene, her debut YA novel My Mechanical Romance released May 2022 from Holiday House (US) and Macmillan Children’s (UK).
Alexene lives and works in Los Angeles with her husband and goblin prince/toddler, where she is generally tolerated by her rescue pit bull.
