Rating: 89% | B+ | ★★★★☆
Synopsis (from Goodreads): 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? Spoiler-Free Review: Alone with You in the Ether is Olivie Blake at her most Olivie Blake–ness. As with The Atlas Six series, Blake fuses physics with long odes on love to create a spellbinding, if unevenly paced, tale. Aldo and Reagan are so much more than what the synopsis promises—they are deeply human and flawed, and they move through their lives with an utterly sympathetic fear and sense of loss. They are beyond typecasting, and perhaps it is to the synopsis's credit that it understates the true chemistry between the characters—leaving all the more for the reader to discover. The novel is subtitled a love story, but there is neither swooning (on the part of the characters or on the part of the reader) nor many confessions of infatuation. It might be more aptly subtitled a soulmate story, with all of the less-romantic connotations of the word "soulmate." She wanted to tell him, to teach him: every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else.
Where Blake stumbles is with the pacing and with the overly complicated science tangents. The third act of the novel is exhilarating and vulnerable; the first two acts, equally vulnerable but not as even. The story drags at times, especially when Blake sinks so deeply into the dreamy landscape of the writing that it's unclear what is actually taking place—what Reagan's criminal past actually is, what Aldo's teaching is actually like. And, of course, try as I did, I could never quite figure out Blake's passionate odes to mathematics and science, though I certainly gripped the life raft of symbolic bees and hexagons for dear life.
I liked this book, but it's probably more accurate to say that I almost loved this book. Many of its quotes will remain with me. This is a story for those hoping to be seen, and for those for whom the societal ideal of love has never fully assuaged their self-consciousness. A new edition of Alone with You in the Ether will be available November 29, 2022.
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From the ArchiveWhile my main reviews are organized by seasons and I try to write reviews immediately after I finish reading, there are always stories that lose to the hustle and bustle of everyday life. From the Archive is a redemptive collection of mini-reviews of books I read in the past that continue to captivate me.
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