There’s a moment in The Space Between Us when Ivy Parker, the sixteen-year-old narrator, hovers outside her grandmother’s room. The door is slightly ajar, the scent of lavender still drifting faintly into the hallway. Ivy doesn’t step inside. She doesn’t reach for the quilt that still holds her grandmother Mae’s warmth or sit in the armchair where Mae once hummed old hymns in the evenings. Instead, she just stands there, caught in the weight of absence, as though even crossing the threshold might unmake her completely.
This is the sort of moment Lei Naomi writes so well, quiet but loaded with emotion, a snapshot of grief’s strange physics. Time slows. Breath catches. And the world, for a flicker, feels tilted. It’s not the kind of scene that demands your attention. It invites it gently, like a hand extended across the silence.
Naomi’s debut novel isn’t a loud book. There aren’t any big story twists or triumphal crescendos that make you feel like you’re in a movie. Instead, it gives us something more rare: a clear glimpse at loss and the gradual, uneven path to healing. In doing so, it reveals how loss reshapes the inner architecture of a life, and how, if we let it, the spaces it leaves behind can become places of renewal.
Ivy’s world has been cleaved in two: the time before Mae’s death and everything that comes after. Mae wasn’t just a grandmother; she was Ivy’s compass, her safe harbor in a family where warmth often felt conditional. Without her, Ivy drifts through familiar rooms and friendships, each one subtly altered by Mae’s absence.
The first thing that stands out to you about Naomi’s writing is how restrained it is. She doesn’t use flowery language or emotional remarks. Instead, she depicts grief as it usually is: boring and confusing. A supper that wasn’t eaten. A diary with blank pages that seem to point fingers. A song on the radio that suddenly feels unbearable because Mae will never hear it again.
In one particularly poignant scene, Ivy walks home from school in the rain, the weight of her wet clothes clinging like her own sadness. She passes a house where a family is gathered on the porch laughing loudly, their voices carrying over the sound of the storm. Ivy pauses, not out of envy, exactly, but because joy feels suddenly foreign, a language she no longer remembers how to speak. Naomi renders the moment without judgment. It’s not that Ivy wants others to stop laughing. It’s that she can’t yet imagine herself laughing again.
But The Space Between Us isn’t a novel about staying stuck in sorrow. Naomi’s genius lies in how she charts Ivy’s slow, halting movement back toward life. Healing here isn’t a sudden revelation; it comes in small, almost imperceptible steps. Ivy shows up to a grief support group she’d planned to skip. She begins sharing awkward, tentative conversations with her younger half-brother. She laughs, hesitantly, when she finds an old photo of Mae wearing sunglasses far too large for her face.
These incremental gestures feel authentic because they mirror the way many of us heal. There are no grand epiphanies. Just daily choices to keep breathing, keep reaching, even when every instinct tells you to retreat.
The emotional core of the book is the relationship between Ivy and her mother. Their conversations are tense at first, and their silences speak louder than their words. Ivy thinks her mother is distant and not paying attention to her, while her mother thinks Ivy is out of reach. But Naomi lets us see how their relationship changes, not with big reconciliations but with small changes. A shared cup of tea becomes a fragile truce. A hand resting briefly on a shoulder carries more weight than a thousand speeches.
This careful portrayal of intergenerational tension feels deeply true to life. Many of us inherit not only love but also patterns of avoidance, longing, and fear from the women who raised us. The Space Between Us acknowledges this complexity while leaving space for something softer to emerge.
The novel stays with you because it looks at memory not as something fixed, but as something that changes and lives. Thinking about Mae is both comforting and painful for Ivy. Every day, she worries that she is getting farther away from hearing her grandmother’s voice. And yet, those same memories are what sustain her, what remind her of who she is and who she’s still becoming.
Naomi understands that grief is never linear. It loops back on itself, showing up in grocery store aisles, in old songs, in the scent of lavender that drifts unexpectedly from a stranger’s scarf. The novel doesn’t frame this as a weakness. Instead, it suggests that carrying our grief, not trying to erase it, is part of how we keep those we’ve lost alive within us.
Though Ivy’s voice grounds the story, Naomi’s writing also holds a mirror to the reader’s own griefs and unspoken longings. It’s impossible not to think about the people we’ve lost or the conversations we never had the courage to start. But there is also a quiet hope here, a feeling that even amid broken relationships and awkward silences, things can be fixed.
This relevance seems to last forever. Naomi won’t call Ivy’s feelings “teenage drama.” She completely agrees with them, saying that young people deal with sadness and strength in ways that adults frequently don’t understand. It’s a subtle challenge to how society minimizes teenage pain, and it feels all the more radical for its gentleness.
By the final chapters, Ivy hasn’t transcended her grief. She hasn’t become a new person. But she has begun to write again, not to escape her pain, but to make sense of it. This isn’t a triumphant ending. It’s something quieter, more enduring: a reminder that survival isn’t about forgetting. It’s about learning to hold memory and possibility side by side without being crushed by their weight.
The Space Between Us is the kind of book that doesn’t demand your attention; it earns it. It asks you to slow down, to sit in stillness, to listen for what lingers in the spaces between words. And if you let it, the story might leave behind a soft imprint, like a hand pressed gently against your heart.