What’s the most specific, memory-invoking scent you can think of? When I smell a certain vanilla-adjacent aroma—not baking vanilla, a little more mixed-up than that—I remember traveling in Tasmania. It’s instant: One whiff of that scent, which was in my sunscreen, and I see little flashes of places I went, beaches and highways and colorful rocks, a beautiful bay and a hilltop at the edge of nowhere.
What if you actually went to the memories that scents—or images, or textures, or sounds or tastes—call up? That’s the case for seventeen-year-old Aimee Roh, the protagonist of Sarah Suk’s The Space Between Here & Now. Generally, she’s an ordinary teenager in a time much like the present. But she has a condition called Sensory Time Warp Syndrome (STWS). When Aimee smells things that remind her of specific memories, she time-travels to those memories, becoming a sort of ghost in her own life, watching the past play out. She might disappear for a minute, or for a few hours. And her disappearances are getting more frequent.
Aimee’s father is notably unfazed about her disappearances, insisting she’ll grow out of them. But Appa is unfazed about most things. A young parent, he is withdrawn and quiet, and doesn’t say much of anything to Aimee. Her mother left when she was younger; her father says he doesn’t know why. But Aimee’s disappearances seem all tied to time she spent with her mother, and she wants to know the truth. What happened, and why did she leave? Why won’t her father talk about it? And what if she never stops disappearing?
The Space Between Here and Now is largely a contemporary young adult novel—but one with a neat speculative twist. Scent is well established as a strong trigger for memories. A person who can’t move on from their memories might be said to be living in the past. Suk, cleverly and gently, makes both of those things literal. For people with STWS, the things that are troubling about their past might become traps—loops they get indefinitely stuck in.
Aimee is about to move on to the next stage of young adulthood. She’s thinking about college, about leaving home—so it’s entirely understandable that she’s also thinking about her childhood, and her mother, and the things she doesn’t know. And her condition looms large over everything she does: What if she disappears on a date? What if she kisses someone and disappears in the middle of it? STWS becomes an effective metaphor for all the anxiety of being 17 and on the cusp of new things: What if you’re not ready for it? What if you’re not really present? What if you ruin everything, unintentionally? What if you get stuck and don’t grow up?
Searching for answers, Aimee heads to Korea, to stay with her aunt and search for her mother. In a sweet bit of rom-com timing, she reconnects with Junho, the son of a friend of her father’s who just so happens to be visiting Seoul at the same time. Aimee is a budding photographer; Junho wants to make webtoons. They bond over a lot of things, but the role of art in their lives is key.
Aimee is extremely relatable: anxious, worried about dumping too much on her friends (a trait she most certainly picked up from her reticent father), stressed about ordinary things and her extraordinary condition, and yet willing to take risks in order to learn what she is so desperate to know. She straddles multiple worlds: here and now, but also the then and there of the memories she visits; her life in Vancouver, but also her Korean heritage, which Suk keeps in the foreground throughout Aimee’s story, through language, food, and interpersonal conflicts both cultural and generational. Aimee needs to find out what happened to her mother, but she also needs to understand why her father is the way he is—why he might be reluctant to take her to a STWS specialist, or make a fuss about her condition. Suk seeds in layers of understanding and acceptance, gentle but constant reminders to Aimee that everyone is dealing with something, from fear of the medical establishment to judgment from their more-traditional peers.
The Space Between Here & Now is a book about growing up, but it’s also a book about growing out—about learning to look beyond yourself, to see past surfaces, and to meet people where they are. It’s charmingly told, with lists and chats and pages from Aimee’s journal, and manages to be at once poignant and breezy, emotionally resonant and narratively compelling. It is, to put it mildly, just begging to be adapted into a sweet and thoughtful teen film. (Netflix, are you listening?)
The Space between Here & Now is published by Quill Tree Books.
