There’s a scene in The Space Between Us that’s so unassuming you might almost miss its weight. Ivy Parker is sitting on the edge of her bed, staring at her hands. She’s just returned from her first grief support group meeting, something she swore she wouldn’t attend, and she’s exhausted, not from talking, but from listening. The room feels impossibly still, as though the air itself is waiting. And for a moment, Ivy wonders if surviving means learning to live with this stillness, rather than trying to escape it.
Lei Naomi’s debut novel is built on moments like these. It doesn’t announce itself loudly or rush toward neat resolutions. Instead, it lingers in spaces most stories skip past: the pause after a difficult conversation, the ache of memories that arrive uninvited, the tentative hope that maybe, just maybe, you can begin again.
In many ways, Ivy’s story is a testament to survival, not the dramatic, Hollywood kind, but the quieter version that plays out in kitchens and bedrooms, on long walks home from school, in unsent text messages. At sixteen, Ivy is still learning how to navigate the world, and when her grandmother Mae dies suddenly, she loses the one person who anchored her. Mae wasn’t just a caregiver; she was Ivy’s compass, her tether to safety in a family marked by emotional distance.
Ivy floats without Mae. The house seems less full. When she talks to her mom, things get tense. Her silent melancholy even starts to hurt her friendships. Naomi does a great job of holding back here. Grief doesn’t manifest here as loud breakdowns or cinematic monologues. Instead, it seeps into Ivy’s life in quiet ways: a journal left unopened for weeks, a favorite meal pushed aside, a familiar song that now feels like betrayal.
Yet The Space Between Us isn’t only about loss. It’s about what happens after, how we learn, in our own time and ways, to keep moving. For Ivy, that process is messy, tentative, and deeply human. Naomi never suggests healing is linear. Some days, Ivy feels almost normal. Other days, the weight of her sadness pulls her back under. But there are glimmers of change: she agrees to help her younger half-brother with a school project, she laughs, hesitantly, at a silly photo of Mae in oversized sunglasses, she lets her mother’s hand rest briefly on her shoulder instead of pulling away.
These small acts are never presented as transformative breakthroughs. They are seeds. And like all seeds, they need time and care to grow.
Ivy’s relationship with her mother is one of the most interesting parts of the book. At first, they avoid one another, have short discussions, and carefully back away from each other. Both of them are hurt, but they don’t know how to talk about it. Watching them begin to inch toward each other feels like witnessing two separate languages finding a shared vocabulary.
There’s no tidy reconciliation here. Naomi resists the temptation to make their relationship whole overnight. Instead, she gives us something more truthful: a series of imperfect, halting efforts. A shared cup of tea. An apology that comes out clumsy but lands anyway. A smile exchanged in the kitchen that feels almost like forgiveness.
It’s in these moments that The Space Between Us becomes more than a story of grief. It transforms into a quiet meditation on the strength it takes to stay, to try, to risk connection even when hurt has closed the door a hundred times before.
There’s also a subtle current of empowerment running through the novel, not the loud, defiant kind, but a softer version that feels more realistic. Ivy doesn’t set out to become strong. She doesn’t set out to be anything at all. But as she begins to write in her journal again, as she starts showing up for herself and others in small ways, she begins to notice the quiet strength that was there all along.
This framing of empowerment feels radical in its simplicity. Naomi suggests that survival isn’t always about dramatic victories. Sometimes it’s about standing still and letting yourself feel. Sometimes it’s about asking for help. Sometimes it’s about forgiving yourself for not being “over it” yet.
For me, one of the most resonant aspects of the novel is its understanding of memory, not as a static thing, but as something alive and shifting. Ivy fears forgetting Mae’s voice, the sound of her laughter. At the same time, she begins to realize that holding on too tightly can make it harder to move forward. This tension is deeply relatable to anyone who has grieved. The book doesn’t offer answers to this dilemma. Instead, it gives us permission to sit with it, to let memory and hope exist side by side.
The Space Between Us is also socially relevant in ways that feel understated yet powerful. It validates the emotional depth of teenagers in a culture that often diminishes their pain as fleeting or melodramatic. Ivy’s grief is treated with full weight, and in doing so, Naomi invites readers to take seriously the struggles young people carry, especially the invisible ones.
By centering a teenage girl’s voice and showing her resilience in quiet, believable ways, the novel gently challenges our ideas of what survival looks like.
By the final pages, Ivy hasn’t conquered her grief. She hasn’t rebuilt her family into something perfect. But she has begun to see herself as someone capable of carrying both loss and love. She has started to imagine a future that includes her pain without being defined by it.
This isn’t triumph in the conventional sense. It’s something softer, steadier. And perhaps that’s why the book lingers so deeply: it reflects the way healing actually happens, not in leaps, but in small, almost imperceptible steps.
The Space Between Us doesn’t demand attention. It earns it. It asks you to pause, to listen to what lives in the silences between words. And if you let it, the novel leaves behind a quiet warmth, like a light in the dark, soft, but enough to guide you forward.