Poolside Read: Alone With You in the Ether

Alone With You in the Ether - Book Review

★★

Alone With You in the Ether has officially earned my first lowest rated book of the year.

When I fist picked up this book and skimmed the synopsis, I thought it was going to be science fiction and I was for some reason expecting something a little strange and otherworldly. So, for a good portion of the book, I kept waiting for something to happen. And I kept reading and waiting and waiting. Around a quarter of the way thought the book, I realized that nothing otherworldly was going to happen.

Alone With You In The Ether is more character driven than action. it’s a story about two people Aldo and Regan, meeting, falling in love, and trying to exist in within that love while also existing in their own minds.

Once I realized that this story wasn’t going in the direction I thought it was I gave it a chance and actually liked it, at first. I enjoyed watching Aldo and Regan meet and slowly become fascinated with one another. I liked the philosophy packaged into their conversations and relationship. It was romantic that two strange people can find someone who seemed to understand the way their mind worked. Their conversations were beautifully scripted like a love letter to everyone who has ever been misunderstood finally finding the one for them.

Olivia Blake has a way of writing about love and obsession that makes even the ugliest emotions sound beautiful. The prose was probably my favorite part of the entire book. There are sentences that make you stop and reread them just because of how beautifully they are constructed. I wish I had a highlighter or was the kind of person who highlighted books because there would have been a lot of passages I would go back to and read like poetry.

Unfortunately, after a while, the words no longer had any effect on me. The more I read, the less Aldo and Regan felt like real people. Their conversations were almost too intelligent, too philosophical, too perfect. I don’t think my problem was that the characters were smart; it was that I could sometimes feel the author behind them. They began to feel less like two people naturally talking to each other and more like two characters created to be the vessel for these beautiful conversations…In other words, they started to feel a little pretentious.

And once Aldo and Regan actually fell for each other, my feelings about their relationship began to change too. In the beginning the intensity felt romantic. But the longer I watched their relationship develop, the more I started thinking: maybe these two people actually aren’t very good for each other. It was kinda like watching knowing something will probably end badly. But still I trudged on.

Regan especially became difficult for me to read. Her obsession with Aldo and the way her mental health deteriorates felt almost uncomfortably accurate at times. There is a particular kind of obsession that can happen when you love someone and begin centering more and more of your emotional world around them. I think nowadays they call that limerence. The book takes even limerence to an extreme with Regan, until her relationship with Aldo. In the end their relationship feels less like love and more like something she needs in order to survive.

There seems to be this idea throughout the story of a partner becoming like a lifeline. Someone is drowning and someone else becomes the person keeping them above water. But what happens when you start expecting another person to save you? And what if you drag them under with you? There is a point where being completely obsessed and consumed by another person stops feeling romantic and starts feeling frightening.

Toward the end, Regan seemed to be spiraling further and further into herself, and I felt like I was spiraling right along with her, but not necessarily in a good way. I felt lost. The story became too abstract for me to follow, and because there was already so little plot carrying me forward, I struggled to stay invested.

That’s exactly what I take away from the title Alone With You in the Ether. Two people floating around inside this intense little world they’ve created together, disconnected from everything else. A world they have built together where they can be strange and obsessive and not care about the people looking in.

I can appreciate what this book was trying to explore. Love, obsession, mental illness, dependency, and our tendency to turn the people we love into life jackets. I just don’t think appreciating those ideas was enough to make me enjoy reading it.

Again I will say, Olivie Blake’s prose is gorgeous. Her language was easily enough to keep this from being a one-star read, and there were romantic moments that I genuinely enjoyed.

But ultimately, Alone With You in the Ether was beautiful writing wrapped around a story that left me feeling empty.