Daphne is the half-demon, half-fallen angel daughter of Lucifer and Lilith. She lives in Pandemonium, a city of steel and heat, where she coddles little treasures from the human world brought to her by her brother, Obie. Life for her is dull, slow, and unchanging, until one day her brother vanishes. Determined to find him, Daphne travels to Earth, where everything is colder and dirtier, and time flashes by far too quickly.
With the help of Truman, a lost and self destructive boy she believes was the last person to see her brother alive, Daphne begins to unveil clues to her brother’s whereabouts. As the back of the book says, “she also discovers, unexpectedly, what it means to love and be human in a world where human is the hardest thing to be.”
After finishing The Replacement, which is currently one of my top reads for 2013, I immediately had to pick up another Yovanoff book. I didn’t quite enjoy The Space Between as much as I enjoyed The Replacement. The beginning was a bit hard to get into and it was hard to get a sense for Daphne, who seems to emotionless. However, once Daphne finally got herself to earth things picked up and became very interesting.
As Daphne is presented with the reality of Earth, she’s forced to really choose who she wants to be. She can be like her sisters, the Lilim, who feed on humanities desires and despairs, or she can be something else — even if she doesn’t know what that is yet. Yovanoff does a great job of portraying Daphne’s confusion and naivete. She doesn’t know much of anything about Earth other than what she’s seen in TV shows and much of what she knows is terribly outdated. She is both vulnerable and yet strong, because while she doesn’t know how things work, she carries with her a deeper wisdom stemmed from her life growing up in the eternal timelessness of Hell.
Then there’s Truman, who’s pain is so raw, you can practically feel it peeling off the page in shreds. Somehow, these two people manage to work together, build trust, and grow from friendship into something more and it’s kind of beautiful.
I’m also a huge fan of moral ambiguity, and this novel which has a demon as its central character is wrought with it. Not only Daphne is likeable but other demons, too, are multi-dimentional, complex, engaging. Even the ones you might not like so much turn out to have layers, facets and raw edges you didn’t expect to find.
There’s also a touch of the horrifying, a few chills along your spin here, a little blood splatter there — another thing I love to see.
Overall, this turned out to be a great read. I may just have to pick up Yovanoff’s next book Paper Valentine.
