Reviews with content warning for Infidelity - Alone with You in the Ether

Reviews tagging 'Infidelity'

Alone with You in the Ether by Olivie Blake

28 reviews

embelle's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional funny reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

I don’t even know what to write for this review, as I still haven’t fully processed this book. I feel like I could read this book 5 times and still not be able to process it. I’m convinced that this book is unlike anything I’ve ever read before or anything that I’ll ever read in the future. Just wow wow wow. The Acknowledgements from Olivie Blake also totally had me in my feelings too

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lucielockettreads's review against another edition

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challenging dark fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

I feel bad for rating it so low because it might just be the writing style that doesn’t work for me, but I did not enjoy this book.

There were snippets I read and it did feel deep and philosophical, as though Blake herself was peering into my soul and wrote the words on paper. Then all the other parts, they just… muddled together. I started skipping pages and pages of waffle which of course is charlottes mania. But the message to do with mental health therapy and TAKING MEDICATION I hated. I study psychology and counselling at university and there is absolutely in my mind a support for therapy, and sometimes medical intervention where therapy is not effective enough, this story says screw therapy and screw my meds!

I understand that the FMC is bipolar and maybe that’s why she never bought it up but the therapist should of saw them signs earlier.

Also aldo and his father are a wonderful story and I actually enjoyed it mostly when they were talking to each other

Also also, sex doesn’t heal everything!!!!!!

TLDR; not my type of genre, which I learnt through reading this, and the writing style… some good moments but a lot was not, although that does relate to the FMC personality.

Check trigger warnings.

Content Warnings

aileron's review against another edition

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challenging reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

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gardens_and_dragons's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

This book about two broken people learning how to love each other as the opposites as they are, but also about how they need to fix themselves so that their flaws don’t consume them each other whole.

The prose was AMAZING and had so many good quotes. I did find myself disliking Regan’s choices and thought processes, but I did empathize with her. I identified a lot with Aldo and his struggles for human connection and finding his purpose in life.

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jbellomy's review against another edition

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emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Torn. The more I think about it, the more I dislike it -- it's like if an early 2010s NLOG watched Garden State and thought, "hey, I bet I could make that angstier." The messaging is icky, the format is needlessly convoluted (form following function? Olivie Blake could NEVER), the dialogue in the first half is so so stilted and offensively twee. The male lead literally does the Augustus Waters thing, but instead of a cigarette, it's a joint that he *doesn't* smoke! (OKAY FINE he does it for a different reason. But in the acknowledgements Blake states that the first image she had of the character was ~a guy who's not smoking the joint he's holding~ and I'm like girl. You obviously watched/read The Fault in Our Stars and the most iconic, silly, parodied-to-death character quirk stuck in your brain and eventually your subconscious convinced you the idea was yours. HOW did no editor catch this. HOW.) (I know it was originally self published but dear god why didn't someone take this out of the final version.) However. There were some moments I really loved (e.g. the church scene kicked absolute ass). It's interesting that most of the negative reviews praise the first half of the book, but I much preferred the latter half. Blake captures the early throws of romantic obsession so well. There were scenes that fully transported me back to my high school relationship, which is wild since these characters are in their mid-late 20's, and, judging by the ending, Blake does not seem to be aware that their relationship is dangerously codependent. Troubling, but what can you do? They're so misunderstood and unique and they simply must let their freak flags fly/ignore all other flags, namely red ones, and dive head first into their all-consuming love! Seriously though, Regan and Aldo think they're hot shit because they've got quirky names and they're malnourished insomniacs and they're mentally ill and have special interests -- like half the book is them saying to each other how different from the rest of the world they both are -- but has anyone told them about the internet?? We're all in the DSM here. Maybe you're not different. Maybe one of you is just kind of rude, and one of you is just kind of mean, and that's fine, but it is not aspirational or romantic. BUUUUT at the same time, *I'm* a kind of rude, kind of mean, mentally ill obsessive freak, and I also get even more insane when I fall in love with someone, so, like, relatable content I guess.* I was an early 2010s tumblr NLOG. And I kinda like Garden State. I'm not going to read the Atlas Six because I cannot stand another second of Olivie Blake's clumsy pontificating about bees or math or philosophy or time or whatever she thinks will make her self-inserts sound smart, but I'm not leaving this book with 100% negative feelings. Tl;dr no regrets about having read this; would not recommend to anyone I respect.

*Regan is out here representing the neurodivergent trust fund babies who are fully incapable of holding down a real job. Though I do not approve of her male manipulator ways, gotta appreciate the rep. She just like me for real.

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clairew97's review against another edition

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emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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greatestheights's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

Ooof. Yeah, this was not for me, although I really thought it might be for a hot second! Part of the problem might be that I chose audio, but by the last third of the book, I knew it was also the lack of plot. I agree with another review noting that this was clearly a labor of love for the author, and I appreciate her explicitly stating that pills are not bad in her author's note — because the whole book basically seems to be trying to say the opposite of that. I have complex feelings about meds and treatment, but Regan truly needed them, and the book seems to argue that she was better off without them. Pretty tired of that trope, which feels a bit 2007 for me to be reading in 2023.

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itsheyfay's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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ericageorge91's review against another edition

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informative reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

So…my thoughts:

Character study - This story was very character-focused with very little plot. I felt like we really got to know Regan and Aldo intimately. However, I wasn’t particularly in love with either of them. I mostly felt ambivalent towards Aldo and then I outright disliked Regan a few times in the book because she baffled me.

I’m sure it was the point of the story, but she seemed to have no fucking idea what she wanted and it frustrated me to no end.

First, she wanted low stakes in a relationship, which she had with Marc. Then, she resented the lack of jealousy from him (you know…a factor of the low stakes relationship 🙄). Then, when Marc does get jealous, Regan gets defensive and is upset that he figured out that she wanted to fuck Aldo before she was ready for Marc to find that out?? Like…WHAT?!? And then, she laments how easy and predictable men were and Aldo did the unpredictable thing and she was mad about it?? Huh??

Regan is the dizziest bitch I have ever read, omg. But, in the end, I disliked the people around Regan (Marc and her mother) even more than I did her, so it bumped my feelings towards her back up to ambivalent.

Storytelling - There was unique storytelling and story structure. I appreciate that the story is divided into six parts like the hexagon theme. That was cute. The first part read like a play. It set the scene with fourth wall breaks with narration and scene descriptions. I did enjoy that aspect. The later parts had a lot of spoken dialogue without quotations and long meandering paragraphs that, I think were meant to depict Regan and Aldo’s racing thoughts? It was kind of confusing, but if that was the point, mission accomplished!

The Romance - I know this was meant to be a love story because I was told so. Do I actually believe in this love story? No. Did I did root for this love story? Also no. I know part of it has to do with me not clicking with the main characters, but part of it was the relationship itself.

By the end of the book, I wasn’t completely convinced that Aldo’s interest in Regan wasn’t an extension of him trying to solve an unsolvable problem to keep his interest and keep him away from drugs. Nor was I persuaded that Regan’s continued interest in Aldo wasn’t just her convincing herself that she wasn’t the impulsive person Marc believed her to be and that this thing with Aldo was built to last.

Light academia? - An ungodly amount of time was devoted to talk of math and bees. Both of which, I care not. This book had the pretentiousness of dark academia with Shakespearan levels of drama. For example, the way that Aldo repeatedly walked around with unsmoked joints, I felt like he had crawled out of the pages of The Fault in Our Stars to tell Regan, “It’s a metaphor” 😂

Also, I was CRINGING at the moment when he finds her artwork and some couple said it was pretty and we got this lovely internal monologue:

“It isn’t pretty, [Aldo] wanted to say, it’s lonely, it’s desolate, it’s a chilling portrait of vastness. How ignorant are you to look at this and diminish it to some kind of trinket, are you dead? It’s the human condition! It’s the entire universe itself! It’s the depths of space-time you utter fucking philistine and how dare you, how fucking dare you stand there and fail to weep?”

And so on and so forth.

I don’t know, man. I’m sure it was supposed to be super deep, but I was just squirming on my couch with second-hand embarrassment 🥴

Bipolar Representation - From the acknowledgments, I can appreciate how personal this story was to the author who went through her own Regan-like journey. I heard that this book has one of the truest portrayals of bipolar disorder. I am not bipolar myself, so I cannot speak to that, but if you’re looking for a book with good mental health rep, this might be it! Just be sure to read the author’s disclaimer because the main character made choices about her treatment that might not be the right choice for others.

Final Thoughts - If you love romance, maybe you can view this story as some modern day, Romeo and Juliet-like shit (without the insta-love), because Aldo and Regan seemed to love each other veryintensely. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t meant to know. And that’s perfectly okay.

I think my opinion of the book definitely suffered due to the hype on BookTok. I was expecting to be emotionally ripped apart and gently put back together and for me, this story did not deliver. I think it was an okay book that if you’re bored, you should give it a try 🤷🏾‍♀️

TW: Drugs, addiction (mention), infidelity (emotional, some physical touching and kissing), overdose, toxic mother relationship

Rep: BIPOC characters, bipolar disorder

Content Warnings

karina_dreamsinwords's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

“I love your brain, even when I fear it.”

This may have taken me a while to get into, but once I was in it— I was utterly consumed by every word. A love story between two souls wandering this earth who happen to cross paths at the precise moment they needed the other. This one touched my soul in a way I can’t explain but d a m n this was beautiful✨

”If this is what it is to burn, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces.”

I know this won’t be for everyone, but wow did this live up to the hype for me.

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