The Space Between Here and Now by Sarah Suk
Think about some of your favorite scents.
Fresh cut grass or maybe popcorn freshly popped at the movie theater. Now, think about the first time you ever smelled it. What if there was a world where each time you smelled this scent you were brought back to the memory of the day that smelled it? Impossible! Well, for Aimee Roh it’s very real and happens far too often. Aimee Roh is the protagonist of the book The Space Between Here & Now by Sarah Suk and she has something known as Sensory Time Warp Syndrome, a rare condition that causes her to time travel to a moment in her life linked to a memory of something she smells. There are other people like Aimee, some of them can hear a song and be transported through their memories or taste a certain coffee blend and go back twenty years.
Her father hopes that one day she’ll grow out of it while Aimee can only hope that she doesn’t vanish completely into a memory. These trips through her memories are usually few minutes, an hour tops, anything more runs the risk of her being lost. Something that should not be possible but rumored amongst the community. Aimee doesn’t think it can happen to her until one day at school she vanishes for nine hours. The memory? The day that her mother left when she was a child. The issue? Well, beyond the whole disappearing for nine hours, the memory doesn’t line up with how her father told her it happened.
Aimee is confused and distraught but needs answers and her father refuses to give them. So, she does the next best thing. She goes to visit her aunt in Korea during spring break so she can hopefully solve the mystery of what happened to her mother all those years ago. And maybe, finds herself in the process.
This was one of my favorite books this year! I read it months ago and still think about it from time to time so I decided to let it be my last blogpost of the year! It’s a short read with some really interesting world-building that draws you in until the very end.