A review by bookishmillennial
Alone with You in the Ether by Olivie Blake

dark emotional reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No
disclaimer if you’ve read other reviews by me and are noticing a pattern: You’re correct that I don’t really give starred reviews, I feel like a peasant and don’t like leaving them and most often, I will only leave them if I vehemently despised a book. I enjoy most books for what they are, & I extract lessons from them all. Everyone’s reading experiences are subjective, so I hope my reviews provide enough information to let you know if a book is for you or not, regardless if I add stars or not. Find me on Instagram: @bookish.millennial or tiktok: @bookishmillennial

This was beautifully and vulnerably written and I admire the author for sharing so graciously with us. Some parts of the book did drag on for me, and felt a bit underwhelming, but overall, I appreciate a deeply explorative character study of two complex humans, which is what Olivie gave us! Not my favorite of her work, but it had some great quotations! (see below lol) 

Quotations that stood out to me: 
“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?”

“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.”

“You are brilliant. Tell your mind to be kind to you today.”

“Whatever you are made of, Charlotte Regan, I am made of it, too.”

“When you learn a new word, you suddenly see it everywhere. The mind comforts itself by believing this to be coincidence but isn’t—it’s ignorance falling away. Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.”

“So when people say we¡re alone in the ether?" "Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.”

“For every sensation Regan could conjure, there was an artist who had beautifully suffered the same.”

“....it is perilously wonderful to suffer so sweetly with you.”

“I am more addicted to the thought of your name on my tongue than I am to any other form of vice.”

“The world loved to take a beautiful woman and exclaim at the charm of her single imperfection”

I love him, and for a moment it doesn't matter whether he loves her back. It is enough to have known that the inside of her chest is more than a place for storage.

“She couldn't prevent the urge to know his thoughts, She wanted to lace them between her fingers, to root them in her hands, to twine them around her limbs until he'd secured her within the invisible web of his carefully ordered madness.”

“The thought of having you is more dangerous than any cocktail of drugs, the idea of belonging to you endlessly destructive.”

“For Aldo, to love something was to study it; to devote every spare thought to understanding it.”


“The truth is that I have no choice but to accept that what's in my head is what's real.”

“She is my hope and for that she is dangerous, unequivocally, but she is also alive, unreservedly.”

“That to love a person was to forfeit the need to place limits on them, and therefore to love was to exist in a constant, paralyzing threat.”
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