Robb Moreira and Sura Siu portray protagonists Aldo and Regan in this contemporary love story. Regan, a bipolar counterfeit artist, and Aldo, a depressed math professor, meet at the Art Institute and strike up an unusual conversation. They continue to meet, discussing their interests and drawing closer. Siu illuminates Regan's bipolar states by mixing tempos and changing pitch. Moreira brings Aldo's matter-of-factness and attention to detail to light through even tones and articulation. The cameos at the beginning of the story are a bit distracting as the audiobook takes on a play format. However, the later cameos work more naturally within the dialogue. Do not miss author Olivie Blake's note at the end of the book. S.K.G. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

09/26/2022

An artist with bipolar disorder and an obsessive mathematician embark on an unconventional romance in this cerebral love story from Blake (The Atlas Six). When Art Institute of Chicago docent Charlotte Regan, who’s in court-ordered psychotherapy following a scheme to counterfeit foreign currency, meets Aldo Damiani, a prickly University of Chicago grad student, their connection is immediate. Aldo urges Regan to agree to six conversations, over the course of which he intends to understand her. With the bemused tolerance of Regan’s boyfriend, the pair grow closer—so close that Regan offers Aldo “one part of me for your consumption.” She expects him to go for sex, but instead he asks for her art, which she hasn’t worked on in years. Spurred on, Regan takes up painting, dumps her boyfriend, quits her medication, and launches a volatile, passionate relationship with Aldo. Blake’s prose is silky and as eccentric as her characters, with an assortment of third-party narrators interrupting the action in “voice-over.” (“THE NARRATOR, A STUDENT WHO HAS JUST ARRIVED: You can never prepare for weathering anything in Chicago.”) The message of finding a richer life off mood stabilizers won’t sit well with all readers, but there’s no denying the characters make for fascinating and complicated studies. This is a book to savor. (Nov.)

"Alone With You in the Ether plays with narrative structure and linear time to weave a story of two broken people crashing together like comets, and we, as audience, are witness to their glorious destruction." — Tor.com

“This is a book to savor.” — Publishers Weekly

"The pages fly by in this character-driven novel that is intimate, complicated, and utterly romantic.” — Booklist

"A wonder of a novel.” — B&N Reads


Praise for The Atlas Six:

“If you’re looking for a book you will want to talk about for a long time (and have plenty of people to talk to about it), The Atlas Six is it.” — Buzzfeed

“Blake introduces six of the most devious, talented, and flawed characters to ever find themselves in a magical library, and then sets them against one another in a series of stunning betrayals and reversals.” — Holly Black, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Night

“Lethally smart. Filled with a cast of brilliantly realized characters, each entangled with one another in torturously delicious ways, The Atlas Six will grip you by the throat and refuse to let go. Olivie Blake is a mind-blowing talent.” — Chloe Gong, author of New York Times bestselling These Violent Delights

“Compelling, entertaining, and addictive.” — T. L. Huchu, author of The Library of The Dead

“This chilling story of ambition and magic will make you question your own morals as you grow to love (and hate) its fascinating, ruthless cast of characters. I utterly devoured this book.” — Amanda Foody, New York Times bestselling author of All of Us Villains

Robb Moreira and Sura Siu portray protagonists Aldo and Regan in this contemporary love story. Regan, a bipolar counterfeit artist, and Aldo, a depressed math professor, meet at the Art Institute and strike up an unusual conversation. They continue to meet, discussing their interests and drawing closer. Siu illuminates Regan's bipolar states by mixing tempos and changing pitch. Moreira brings Aldo's matter-of-factness and attention to detail to light through even tones and articulation. The cameos at the beginning of the story are a bit distracting as the audiobook takes on a play format. However, the later cameos work more naturally within the dialogue. Do not miss author Olivie Blake's note at the end of the book. S.K.G. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

2022-10-20
Two unusual people find intellectual and emotional stimulation with each other, shaking up their stagnant lives.

Regan is a charismatic aspiring artist and failed counterfeiter who struggles to feel or find purpose in anything, a condition she attributes to the pills she takes to moderate her bipolar disorder. Aldo is a doctoral student in theoretical mathematics whose thought processes are so abstruse and relentlessly active that he is a terrible lecturer, lacks any close relationships other than with his father, and requires drugs to quiet his brain. One day, Regan is volunteering as a docent at the Art Institute of Chicago when she encounters Aldo sitting on the floor of a gallery trying to puzzle out the secrets of time travel. Thus begins a peculiar acquaintanceship built on six important conversations that eventually spark an all-encompassing, dangerously obsessive love. Is this relationship something that will bring out the potential best from these two, or their worst? The story is somewhat burdened by the reader's expectations of where it might be going. If an author is currently writing a series of contemporary fantasy novels that incorporate time travel, then breaks off midsequence to publish a new work with a science fictional–sounding title and a main character obsessed with theoretical time travel, then it’s natural to assume that, eventually, actual time travel will feature in the plot. These two people are so far outside the ordinary that it’s difficult to conceive of them existing in this mundane world. The omniscient narrator suggests that the couple’s meeting is an epic moment. All of this is to say that fans of The Atlas Six (2022) and The Atlas Paradox (2022) expecting magic, time travel, or any other speculative elements may be disappointed when these expectations are built up to a certain extent but never fulfilled. If this work and Blake’s other books share something, it’s that characters who are not easy to like are still interesting to read about.

Reasonably involving when appreciated on its own terms.