THE SPACE BETWEEN
by Sarah Ready
A young performer in a family band and the daughter of an ultrarich New York business mogul fall in love in Ready’s contemporary romance novel.
A young man named Jace Morgan races through New York’s Central Park to try to stop a wedding, sharing an intense look with the bride when he arrives. “I almost can’t reconcile the Andi lying in my arms last night with the Andi standing in the gazebo,” he muses. The narrative then cycles back to Jace at 17 years old, being taunted by Reid Shilling and other rich boys from the private school that he attends on scholarship. The bullies disperse when the fight is broken up by a girl named Andrea Leighton-Hughes, who introduces herself as Andi. The teens hang out and fall in love. Jace plays guitar in a band called the Morgan Brothers with his brothers, Dean and River. His musician parents were the victims of a shooting incident in a Bronx bodega, forcing eldest son Dean to take on construction work to support the family while also trying to score their band gigs. Jace chokes up singing in public, but he is able to relax when he sees Andi at their shows. When the band gets a last-minute job at a charity gala, Jace discovers that Andi is the daughter of Robert Chatham Leighton-Hughes, one of the richest men in Manhattan. She tells him that she is merely a “chess piece” in her family and that she has a particularly cold mother. Andi travels with Jace for months when the band gets a national tour but returns to New York following a shocking betrayal. Andi forms new bonds with both Reid and her mother while Jace contends with fame and family issues. Years later, the lovers reconnect and move forward.
The author has written an entertaining, emotion-laden rich girl–poor boy romance. The novel effectively celebrates and leverages its New York City setting, with several key scenes taking place in Central Park, specifically in Belvedere Castle. Andi’s overbearing family amusingly parallels that of a real-life New York real estate mogul and former president: They live on the top floors of a gilded, garish tower; Andi’s brothers (including a Robert Jr.) vie for attention; and the matriarch is glamorous and enigmatic. Several of the book’s wealthy characters end up inspiring sympathy in ways that are surprising yet satisfying. Adding to the novel’s engaging web of plot twists are moments in which band members commit or confess to some rather grave misdeeds. Some of the periods of estrangement the lovers experience come off as a bit far-fetched, particularly a separation precipitated in part by a letter gone astray. Andi’s motivation for her marriage, however, is developed beautifully by the author to exploit its full potential for pathos. This subplot also allows for a lovely moment of contemplation by the ostensible antagonist, Reid, that provides context for the novel’s title: “And my therapist said that the best way to move through grief is to concentrate on the right now. Not the past, not the future, just this moment right here. That small space between the past and the future. Like the moment between the inhale and the exhale.”A touching tale of adult reckonings and reunions with some heart-tugging reversals.