There’s a moment in Lei Naomi’s The Space Between Us when Ivy Parker lingers in the doorway of her grandmother’s room. Mae’s lavender scent still hangs in the air, faint but insistent, like a presence refusing to leave. Ivy doesn’t step inside. She doesn’t touch anything. She just stands there, suspended, as though crossing the threshold might unmake her completely.
That single, quiet scene stayed with me long after I turned the page. It isn’t dramatic, but it captures something essential about grief, the way it arrests you mid-step, makes even the simplest actions feel monumental.
Naomi’s debut novel doesn’t aim to dazzle with high-stakes twists or overwrought revelations. Instead, it invites readers into the intimate spaces of a young woman’s loss and resilience. It opens a conversation not only about survival and healing but about the invisible threads that connect us: between generations, between friends, and between the people we’ve loved and the people we’re still becoming.
Ivy is sixteen, old enough to understand the permanence of death but young enough to feel unmoored by it. Ivy’s grandma, Mae, was more than just a caregiver; she was an anchor in a world that frequently felt shaky. Ivy has to deal with the huge hole left by Mae’s sudden departure, not only in her home but also in her sense of self. Naomi does this with amazing restraint. There are no cathartic breakdowns or easy moral lessons. Instead, grief creeps into the corners of Ivy’s life: a meal she can’t bring herself to eat, a journal she can’t bring herself to write in, a song on the radio that feels like a betrayal because Mae will never hear it again.
While the novel begins in the depths of Ivy’s grief, it isn’t a story about staying there. Slowly, she begins to reach outward. It starts small: attending a school grief group she swore she’d avoid, exchanging awkward but tender conversations with her younger half-brother, sorting through Mae’s belongings and laughing, hesitantly, at an old photo of her grandmother in oversized sunglasses. Naomi frames healing not as a destination but as a practice. There’s no singular moment where Ivy “gets over it.” Instead, the book suggests that recovery lives in incremental gestures: planting flowers in Mae’s honor, writing letters she may never send, allowing her mother’s hand to rest briefly on her shoulder without pulling away.
One of the most powerful undercurrents in The Space Between Us is the relationship between Ivy and the women in her life, particularly her mother. At first, their dynamic is all sharp edges and silence. Ivy sees her mother as distant and distracted; her mother views Ivy as unreachable. They circle one another warily, both carrying unspoken wounds. Naomi doesn’t offer an easy reconciliation. She lets us watch how their walls change, brick by brick, instead. A cup of tea together is a peace offering. Her mother’s awkward apology hits her like a stone thrown into quiet water, and the ripples are slow but real. This thorough portrayal of the friction between generations feels very real. Many of us inherit not only love but also patterns of avoidance, fear, and longing from the women who raised us. The Space Between Us acknowledges this complexity while leaving space for something softer to emerge.
Though it’s Ivy’s voice we follow, Naomi’s storytelling holds a mirror up to our own unspoken griefs and fractured relationships. We can’t help but think of the folks we’ve lost or the talks we wish we’d had. The book’s themes seem to always be relevant. Naomi gently resists the urge to downplay the problems that young people face by focusing on a teenage girl’s inner life and validating her anguish. In Ivy’s world, the two coexist: sorrow softening into laughter, memories that sting even as they sustain.
By the end of The Space Between Us, Ivy hasn’t transcended her grief. She hasn’t become an entirely different person. But she has begun to carry her pain differently, not as a burden to be cast off, but as part of the story she is still writing. This feels like the novel’s greatest wisdom: that survival isn’t about forgetting or moving on. It’s about remembering what we’ve lost while also letting ourselves grasp for what we still have. Naomi doesn’t force a solution, which is why the book feels so real. It reminds us that healing is rarely clean or complete, but that doesn’t make it any less holy.