There’s a moment toward the end of The Space Between Us when Ivy Parker, tired from a day that felt heavier than usual, sits at the kitchen table across from her mother. Neither of them says much. A tea kettle hisses softly on the stove. The air between them is fragile, weighted with years of unspoken hurt. And yet, in that stillness, Ivy feels something shift, not a sweeping forgiveness, but a recognition: her mother is trying, in her own faltering way, to reach her.
It’s the kind of scene that Lei Naomi’s debut novel excels at: quiet, unassuming, but brimming with emotional resonance. On the surface, The Space Between Us is a story about grief and survival. But read more closely, and it’s also about the complex, often unacknowledged work that women do to hold families together, and the generational threads of care and pain that bind mothers, daughters, and grandmothers across time.
Ivy’s grief for her grandmother, Mae, is the entry point into the novel’s emotional landscape. Mae was more than a caregiver. In a home where affection was frequently felt as conditional, she was Ivy’s compass and her safe place. Ivy has to deal with both the emptiness her grandma leaves behind and the difficult, raw relationship she has with her own mother now that Mae is gone.
What makes Naomi’s storytelling so compelling is how it resists oversimplification. The mother-daughter dynamic here isn’t defined by cruelty or tenderness alone; it’s a delicate braid of both. Ivy’s mother isn’t an antagonist. She is a woman who has been hurt, who carries her own quiet griefs, and who struggles, sometimes failing, to love in the way Ivy needs her to.
This portrait feels deeply familiar, especially to readers who grew up in households where affection was shown in gestures rather than words, where care often took the form of sacrifice or silence.
Mae, by contrast, is remembered as warm, constant, and nurturing. But Naomi doesn’t turn her into a saint. Through Ivy’s fragmented memories, we sense Mae’s complexities too: her moments of fatigue, her quiet sorrows, her deep desire to give Ivy the kind of stability her own daughter never had. There’s an unspoken question running beneath the narrative: What emotional debts and gifts are passed down from one generation of women to the next?
In one especially poignant passage, Ivy sorts through Mae’s belongings and finds an old photograph tucked into a cookbook. Mae is young in the picture, her hair loose around her shoulders, her laughter frozen mid-breath. Ivy stares at it for a long time, realizing for the first time that Mae had a whole life before she became “Grandma.” That recognition is jarring and tender all at once.
It’s a moment that speaks to a universal shift many of us experience as we grow older: the slow dawning awareness that our mothers and grandmothers are not just caretakers but whole people, with their own dreams, regrets, and wounds.
What The Space Between Us captures so beautifully is the quiet heroism of women who carry the emotional labor of families, those who bake the cakes for birthdays no one thanks them for, who make the hard phone calls, who show up even when they’re exhausted. And it doesn’t romanticize that labor. Naomi gently suggests that this kind of care is both sustaining and costly, and that the line between love and self-sacrifice is often blurred.
For Ivy’s mother, the cost of that emotional labor shows in her brittle silences, her tendency to retreat rather than confront. For Mae, it shows in her bone-deep weariness near the end of her life, even as she continues to pour herself out for Ivy. And for Ivy, it shows in the way she tries to hold her own pain quietly, not wanting to add weight to a house already heavy with unspoken sadness.
These generational patterns of care and repression feel especially poignant in a time when conversations about emotional inheritance, how we absorb the ways our mothers loved or withheld love, are becoming more common.
Naomi’s prose carries these themes with a quiet elegance. Her writing is never showy, but it pulses with insight. When Ivy describes grief as “a rope twisting between the women in our family, sometimes tying us together, sometimes pulling us apart,” the line lands with startling clarity. It’s an image that echoes long after you close the book.
By the final chapters, Ivy hasn’t resolved everything with her mother. They don’t fall into each other’s arms, promising to do better. But there are signs of softening. A shared laugh over Mae’s old gardening hat. A hand rests lightly on Ivy’s back as her mother walks past. These moments feel small, but in a novel so attuned to quiet shifts, they register like seismic events.
Naomi isn’t suggesting that generational wounds heal overnight. She’s reminding us that healing is often slow, halting, and deeply human. It begins not with grand gestures but with the willingness to stay in the room, to keep trying even when it hurts.
The Space Between Us lingers because it feels true, not only to the pain of loss but also to the fragile beauty of the bonds between women. It invites us to consider the hands that have carried us, and to wonder what kind of hands we want to offer in return.
It’s the kind of book you finish and immediately think about calling your mother, or flipping through an old album to remember your grandmother’s face. And maybe that’s its quiet magic, not that it offers answers, but that it nudges us, gently, to ask better questions of the women who came before us, and of ourselves.