asianamlitfans | A Review of Sarah Suk’s The Space Between Here & Now (Quill Tree, 2023)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn

Edited by Lizzy Sobiesk

Well, I’m so glad to be reviewing Sarah Suk’s The Space Between Here & Now (Quill Tree, 2023), because I haven’t been on top of YA fiction lately. I always forget how pleasurable they can be to read. In any case, as per usual, I offer the marketing description here to ground us: “Seventeen-year-old Aimee Roh has Sensory Time Warp Syndrome, a rare condition that causes her to time travel to a moment in her life when she smells something linked to that memory. Her dad is convinced she’ll simply grow out of it if she tries hard enough, but Aimee’s fear of vanishing at random has kept her from living a normal life. When Aimee disappears for nine hours into a memory of her estranged mom—a moment Aimee has never remembered before—she becomes distraught. Not only was this her longest disappearance yet, but the memory doesn’t match up with the story of how her mom left—at least, not the version she’s always heard from her dad. Desperate for answers, Aimee travels to Korea, where she unravels the mystery of her memories, the truth about her mother, and the reason she keeps returning to certain moments in her life. Along the way, she realizes she’ll need to reconcile her past in order to save her present.”

So, one might consider Suk’s YA novel a kind of low-intensity speculative fiction, possibly even a low fantasy. The speculative element is of course the Sensory Time Warp Syndrome. This “syndrome” sort of reads as a disease, and there is certainly a queer element to it, as people who are afflicted with it may not even want to reveal that they are suffering from it. And by, suffering, I do mean the fact that people who undergo time traveling within their memory disappear for a length of time from the present. They only reappear when they have finished re-experiencing their memories. The speculative conceit is really interesting and simultaneously limiting, in the sense that Aimee cannot change anything from her past. She can only observe, almost from a third person perspective. As Aimee continues to suffer from these episodes of time-warping, she decides she must travel to Korea; she believes her mother might hold answers. Indeed, she begins to wonder if there is a genetic link to the syndrome and that perhaps her mother might have the syndrome herself. The journey to Korea is obviously fraught; her father doesn’t want to go, but eventually relents. While there, Aimee must find the courage to face some deep family secrets. I won’t spoil the ending here, but I’m most impressed by the textured portrayal of a single Korean immigrant father’s relationship with his child. Suk’s story is full of poignant moments that feel well-earned. The added bonus is how she weaves in the speculative dimensions. Indeed, one of the most intriguing things that readers discover is that those with this syndrome can sometimes drop into each other’s memories, especially if they occurred at a similar time and place. Others can become trapped in the past and be stuck in a kind of time loop. These elements make this YA novel filled with realist pathos and speculative whimsy. Certainly, this is one of those YA novels that rises to the level of a narrative you might want to teach in a classroom.

Buy the Book Here