Alone With You in the Ether

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cried, sobbed, threw up, cut off all my hair, threw myself down the stairs, crash my car into a grocery store, drank bleach straight from the bottle, lit a cigarette next to my dads oxygen tank, and entered a lions den. this is the best written book i’ve come across. This reading group guide for Alone With You includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Marisa Silver. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book. Where do I even start?? The mental health representation and genuineness and realistic nature of this book is top tier. This book felt like a hug and fresh air to me. I really enjoyed how Amelia Diane Coombs portrayed the main characters, in particular Eloise, her mental health battle and her coping mechanisms. I felt Eloise in my bones. I relate to the struggle so much and just seeing her growth throughout the book was amazing. Coombs portrayed the story in such a way that it felt as if I was talking to Eloise and hearing the story from her myself. It was beautifully written. 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 In] Alone With You, Marisa Silver explores the impact of collateral damage, whether sustained in war or life - brisk and keenly observed - Silver's characters manage somehow to emerge as credible realists, unafraid of the rigors of making do. Even in the darkest moments, their stories are illuminating as they find the courage to face who they are.

Eight indelible stories that mine the complexities of modern relationships and the unexpected ways love manifests itself.Marisa Silver dazzled and inspired readers with her critically acclaimed The God of War (a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist), praised by Richard Russo as “a novel of great metaphorical depth and beauty.” In this elegant, finely wrought new collection, Alone With You, Silver has created eight indelible stories that mine the complexities of modern relationships and the unexpected ways love manifests itself. Her brilliantly etched characters confront life’s abrupt and unsettling changes with fear, courage, humor, and overwhelming grace. In the O. Henry Prize-winning story “The Visitor,” a VA hospital nurse’s aide contends with a family ghost and discovers the ways in which her own past haunts her. The reticent father in “Pond” is confronted with a Solomonic choice that pits his love for his daughter against his feelings for her young son. In “Night Train to Frankfurt,” first published in The New Yorker, a daughter travels to an alternative-medicine clinic in Germany in a gambit to save her mother’s life. And in the title story, a woman vacations in Morocco with her family while contemplating a decision that will both ruin and liberate them all. From “Temporary,” where a young woman confronts the ephemeral nature of companionship, to “Three Girls,” in which sisters trapped in a snowstorm recognize the boundaries of childhood, the nuanced voices of Alone With You bear the hallmarks of an instant classic from a writer with unerring talent and imaginative resource. Silver has the extraordinary ability to render her fictional inhabitants instantly relatable, in all their imperfections. Her stories have the singular quality of looking in a mirror. We see at once what is familiar and what is strange. In these stirring narratives, we meet ourselves anew. Alone With You by Marisa Silver – eBook Details I always have a hard time reviewing books that I really, really love, so I’ll do my best here. The best parts of All Alone With You are Eloise’s relationship with Austen and her relationship with Marianne. But that’s what everybody says, of course,” the man said. Vivian could hear the tension in his voice. He must have stood up at that point because as he continued his voice grew distant and full of air. “You must hear stupid, obvious things like that every day,” he said. “ ‘We have a lot of love to give.’ It’s probably meaningless to you. But what else can we say? We want a child. We have enough money to offer a child a good life, all the advantages. We’re decent people with decent values. But it feels like we’re paying the price for some biological glitch we have no control over.” 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. Olivie has penned several indie SFF projects, including the webtoon Clara and the Devil with illustrator Little Chmura and the viral Atlas series. As Follmuth, her young adult rom-com My Mechanical Romance releases May 2022.There was only one thing I disliked, which is minuscule and became a less of an issue the further I got into the book. In the beginning, the wording was a bit repetitive when describing Austin as “golden retriever energy”. It happened often in the beginning and slowly died off. I noticed “chain smoked” was used often as well, but wasn’t as bad. Regan’s art exhibit was so cliché that I couldn’t believe it. Really? We’re going in this direction? This is the big finale? How basic! This book was set up to be so much more than that— so much edgier than that— what happened?! How did we end up in Live, Laugh, Love territory? Talk about the temporary things in Vivian’s life – her living situation, her job, her friends. How do they shape her? What kind of person is she? That aside, this book was a delight. I went in looking for something light that would give me the warm and fuzzies and while I cried MULTIPLE times reading that (accurate portrayals of social anxiety just hit different okay) it did in fact deliver on the warms and the fuzzies. The characters were the kind that you instantly wanted to get to know and were definitely the strength of the book. But honestly I almost rounded it up to a 5 star because that cover is everything. A) I want to look half as cool as Eloise looks on that cover (and never will), and B) I love when people do that thing where they hold up an album or a book and like, complete it with their bodies (???) and it kind of looks like that. Aldo was thinking about quantum groups. Specifically, hexagons. It was Aldo’s firm belief that the hexagon was the most significant form in nature, not purely because of his fondness for the Apis—commonly known as the honeybee—but not entirely unrelated. Many people were typically unaware of how many kinds of bees there were. The bumblebee was slow and stupid enough to be petted, which was sort of sweet, though not quite as interesting.

Eloise Deane is the worst and doesn’t care who knows it. She’s grumpy, prefers to be alone, and is just slogging through senior year with one goal: get accepted to USC and move to California. So when her guidance counselor drops the bombshell that to score a scholarship she’ll desperately need, her applications require volunteer hours, Eloise is up for the challenge. Until she’s paired with LifeCare, a volunteer agency that offers social support to lonely seniors through phone calls and visits. Basically, it’s a total nightmare for Eloise’s anxiety. There was a right answer to this question and many, many wrong ones. This question, much like quantum groups, did not get any easier the more times Aldo was asked. The more times he ran the scenarios, in fact, the more the variables changed. How was he feeling? He had been bad before. He would be bad again. It would cycle and fluctuate the same way the weather would. It would rain in two weeks, he thought.But she didn’t ask, because she didn’t want to appear ignorant, and because her parents had taught her that it was impolite to talk about money. My dentist keeps warning me about bruxism, but I grind my molars anyway. For the last three years, I’ve had one goal: getting into the University of Southern California. Until last month, I was intent on laser-focusing on my fall grades, playing video games in my spare time, and senioritis-ing my way to graduation once that acceptance pinged my inbox. Then Dad lost his job. Aldo’s right thumb beat against his thigh, percussive to the rhythm of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” Content Warnings: depression, anxiety, death of a parent (past), grief, car accident (past, mentioned)

The director of the agency assured them that they had done well in the interview process, but that it was her job to match the right children with the right parents and this effort could take time. The stupid, obvious things,” Vivian said. “People who have a lot of love to give.” She was immediately ashamed of her small cruelty, but he did not seem to remember his own words.ALL ALONE WITH YOU is a young adult romance with underlying themes of anxiety and mental health awareness. Eloise doesn't trust easily because she's been burned before and finds it difficult to form and maintain a bond with both Austin and Marianne. For someone with anxiety, it's so much easier to shut down and shut people out. Eloise faces the decision to continue developing relationships with these two very different people or retreating into her shell. As new problems arise, she finds her daily mental health challenged in the best and worst ways. I received an ARC from the publisher through Netgalley. These are my honest opinions, and in no way was I compensated for this review.** A large portion of the story is dedicated to Lou's depression and anxiety and how that makes her interpret the world around her even when those interpretations aren't true. She is a self loathing character who holds everyone at arms length and uses rudeness as a way to keep them there. She's not a likable character per say but I did she where she was coming from and found her to be an interesting/dynamic character.