I finally read my first book of 2024 and I was disappointed. It wasn't bad per say but it wasn't up to the hype. I'm getting ahead of myself though, let me introduce the book.

The first book I read this year was Alone With You In The Ether by Olivie Blake. If you're on the bookish community, booktwt, booktube, bookstagram or booktok….you know what forget booktok, they have questionable tastes on that platform. But if you're on the other platforms, you've probably heard of this book. Two of my favorite booktubers recommended it so I was pretty excited to start it.

Here's the synopsis:

Two people meet in the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist, undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. By the end of the story, these things will still be true. But this is not a story about endings.

For Regan, people are predictable and tedious, including and perhaps especially herself. She copes with the dreariness of existence by living impulsively, imagining a new, alternate timeline being created in the wake of every rash decision.

To Aldo, the world feels disturbingly chaotic. He gets through his days by erecting a wall of routine: a backbeat of rules and formulas that keep him going. Without them, the entire framework of his existence would collapse. 

For Regan and Aldo, life has been a matter of resigning themselves to the blueprints of inevitability—until the two meet. Could six conversations with a stranger be the variable that shakes up the entire simulation?

It took me 10 days to finish this book. The moment I started struggling to finish it, I should have known it wasn't really all that. To clarify, I take an average of 3 days to finish a book or at most 5 days. I'm someone who believes in DNFing a book because I can't stress myself but I refused to DNF this particular one because I wanted to see what the hype was about(an error on my part)

Now Olivie Blake is an excellent writer, I'm talking about her writing style if it wasn't clear. It's something I've never read so that was a huge deal for me. I enjoyed it completely. What I had issue with was the characters. No matter how I tried, I couldn't connect with Rinaldo or Charlotte. When I read books, I like to get immersed in it. I like to feel like a part of the story, I want to connect with those characters. But with this book, it felt like I was a passerby. I couldn't connect to their pain or happiness.

I expected this book to cause me pain and I was excited about it. I was sure it was going to be an easy 5 star read but boy was I in for a shock. I completely disconnected from the book in the last third. It wasn't a case of "omg what happens next" anymore. It was more like "I need to finish this so that I can mark it as complete on Goodreads". There was so much build up and everything only for me to get disappointed.

I think that maybe it's because of the writing style that people are enamoured by the book because there was nothing profound about the actual storyline. Or maybe I'm the problem, who knows?

PS: If anyone knows any author that writes like Olivie Blake please recommend some of their works.