A review by stories_of_the_soul27
Alone With You in the Ether by Olivie Blake

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? It's complicated

4.5

[And what he asks, is the Truth? 
That she will keep turning corners until she finds him.]

[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 paralysing threat.]

[Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else. It seems like it’s the right shape but it’s slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are transformed into something unrecognisable, and it happens so slowly, you don’t even notice, like shading scales and making new ones.] 

She is the version of herself because of him, and vice versa. 

I would be simultaneously terrified and exhilarated if I ever find myself loving someone like Regan and Aldo loved each other. They are co-dependent (a relationship I am slowly beginning to detect in stories). I do not know much about love but Regan & Aldo have shown me a new version of love and it’s deep, vast, free falling, scary, holy, uncertain but theirs to hold and cherish. 

My favourite lines: Did it matter where it started, and would it matter where it would end? Either yes, it mattered very much, because everything was a consequence of something and therefore what became of them was somehow predetermined, or no, it did not matter at all, because beginnings and endings were not as important as the moments that could have happened or the outcomes that might have been. Either it was everything to know the whole story, to look back and see the shape of it while standing along its periphery; or it was nothing, because things in their entirety were less fragile and therefore less beautiful than the pieces within the frame.