There’s a moment in The Space Between Us that lingers quietly in my mind. Ivy Parker is walking home from school, alone as she has been for weeks. She passes the park where she and Maya used to meet after class, their laughter ringing out so loudly once that an older couple on a bench smiled in spite of themselves. But now, the park feels foreign. She doesn’t go in. She doesn’t even glance toward the swing set where they once shared secrets. Instead, she keeps walking, her chest tightening with the realization that some spaces become haunted, not by ghosts, but by memory.
Lei Naomi’s debut novel captures the subtle heartbreak of friendship lost and the fragile hope of connection renewed. Ivy’s sadness over losing her grandmother is a big part of the story, but so are her changing relationships with her estranged best friend Maya and her younger half-brother Jules. These links make a hushed chorus of pain, longing, and hesitant love, showing how relationships can break and sometimes heal.
Maya was once Ivy’s other home. The two girls had spent hours sprawled across Maya’s bed listening to playlists they built for each other, inventing elaborate plans for the future, trading whispered confessions about crushes and fears. But when Mae died, Ivy pulled away, not out of anger, but out of a kind of numbness. She didn’t know how to carry her grief and share herself at the same time. And Maya, unsure of how to bridge the widening gap, didn’t push.
Naomi captures this drift with such accuracy that it aches. Friendship breakups, especially in adolescence, often leave wounds that are harder to name than romantic ones. There are no public declarations of heartbreak, no rituals for mourning. Only the quiet recognition that someone who once felt like a sister is now a stranger.
Yet Maya doesn’t vanish from Ivy’s world. They orbit each other in the hallways at school, their eyes occasionally meeting, both carrying unspoken questions: Could we still fix this? Would it even matter now?
Jules, Ivy’s younger half-brother, begins the story on the outskirts of her world. He’s too young, too cheerful, too untouched by the weight Ivy carries to feel like someone she can lean on. Early on, she resents his presence, not because of anything he’s done, but because he represents the life her mother built without her, the life Ivy feels she was never fully invited into.
But Jules, in his small, persistent way, keeps showing up. He asks Ivy for help with a science project. He offers her a piece of his Halloween candy when she comes home late one evening, soaked from the rain. And slowly, Ivy begins to realize that her relationship with Jules doesn’t have to mirror her relationship with her mother. It can be something new.
Their bond develops not through big revelations but through these tiny gestures: shared jokes at the dinner table, the comfort of watching cartoons together in companionable silence. By the end of the novel, Jules has become not just her brother in name but her brother in heart.
The scenes where Ivy, Maya, and Jules intersect carry some of the book’s deepest emotional resonance. When Maya finally visits Ivy at home, it is Jules who, with a child’s unselfconscious generosity, offers her a cookie and tells her she was missed. The moment is brief but powerful, a reminder of how children can cut through tension in ways adults often cannot.
It’s also in this scene that Ivy and Maya begin to talk again, not as though nothing happened, but with an awareness of the distance between them and a shared willingness to close it. Maya admits she didn’t know what to say after Mae’s death. Ivy admits she didn’t know how to ask for help. There’s no dramatic embrace, no “back to normal” promise. But there’s honesty, and for them, that’s enough.
What makes these relationships feel so true is Naomi’s refusal to tie them up neatly. The healing between Ivy and Maya is not instantaneous. The bond with Jules isn’t perfect. And yet, there is movement. There is a possibility.
In many ways, these connections reflect the novel’s larger themes: how survival is rarely a solitary act, how grief can isolate us even from the people we love most, and how repair, when it comes, often arrives in small, quiet moments.
Maya represents the friendships we fear we’ve broken beyond repair, and the relief of discovering they can be rebuilt, even if they look different than before. Jules represents the family ties we don’t choose but can grow into if we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. Together, they remind Ivy and us that even in loss, love continues to find its way back in.
By the final chapters, Ivy stands in the park with Maya again. They aren’t laughing loudly the way they once did. Instead, they’re sitting side by side on the swings, their feet tracing shallow furrows in the dirt. The conversation between them is light, almost shy. But Ivy feels a warmth in her chest she hasn’t felt in months, not because everything is fixed, but because she isn’t alone anymore.
Naomi leaves us with a subtle but powerful truth: relationships, like people, can break. But they can also bend, adapt, and begin again. And sometimes, the spaces between us, between friends, siblings, even strangers, hold the very light we need to keep going.