About the Book

From the instant #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six comes a story about the nature of love, what it means to be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as if you’re not broken. A must for fans of Sally Rooney and Gabrielle Zevin. 

Chicago, sometime. Two people meet in the armoury of 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. After their meeting, those things do not change. 

Everything else, however, is slightly different. 

Both obsessive, eccentric personalities, Aldo Damiani and Charlotte Regan struggle to be without each other from the moment they meet. The truth – that he is a clinically depressed, anti-social theoretician and she is a manipulative liar with a history of self-sabotage – means the deeper they fall in love, the more troubling their reliance on each other becomes. 

About the Author

Olivie Blake, the pseudonym of Alexene Farol Follmoitj, is a lover and writer of stories. She has penned several indie SFF projects, including the webtoon Clara and the Devil with illustrator Little Chmura and the BookTok viral Atlas series. As Alexene, she has written the young adult rom-com My Mechanical Romance. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, new baby and rescue pit bull. Find her at olivieblake.com. 

What I Thought

Olivie Blake knows how to write complex and flawed characters and this book focuses in the main on our two protagonists, Regan and Aldo, and she does an excellent job of embedding us inside their heads. Not always the most fun places to be. 

I wonder if that may be why the POV is more omniscient. For me it put distance between us and them, almost like we were gods on Mount Olympus watching the mortals below. However, maybe being purely in their heads would have been too much. In fact the earlier sections include random character narrators – this gives an interesting ‘relationship in the eyes of observers’ vibe. 

There is a recurring motif of bees and  hexagons and the book is consequently presented in six parts (with an additional hypothesis). I have to admit to finding the earlier three parts easier to read. I think the will they won’t they part of their relationship was the most engaging to me. In part four, although I assumed we were still talking about Aldo and Regan, they didn’t get named for much of it – increasing the distance for the reader especially because of how part three ended and the feeling of missing out on part of the journey. It also focused on sex – a lot. 

In the latter parts the focus on Regan’s mental health becomes more intense and there is an author note about this in the acknowledgments which I do think it’s important to read (about medication use). I think the mania that the character is feeling is perhaps reflected in the choppy tangental way the story is told.

I’d wondered if there was going to be more on the time travel aspect so maybe a slight sci-fi or magical realism element, but, like Aldo’s calculations, that stays firmly in the theoretical. I really enjoyed all of the mathematical discussions and their early conversations was so true to how neurodivergent people braindump to connect. I loved it. Regan’s relationship with art is complex and how that developed alongside her relationship with Aldo did demonstrate how at times we do need others to see the potential in us. He was her muse if you like, unlocking what he already knew to be true.
This book is complex for me to review because I think it does what it sets out to really well – exploring how two people that society would consider broken connect. It’s complexity is in how healthy or unhealthy that relationship is – and the fact that both are true is truer to life than we usually see in fiction.

I do think it would make a marvellously romantically complex film in the vein of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Silver Linings Playbook and so if you are in the mood for either of those in book form I’d definitely pick this up. It’s much quieter and less plot heavy than The Atlas books though so do be prepared for a change of pace.

The writing is exquisite and there are some wonderfully described phrases and moments. I would say that to me the book reads more on the literary end. 

Thanks to Black Crow PR and the publisher for the gifted copy for the purposes of an honest review. Do check out the rest of the tour to see what everyone else thought too.