scijessreads

Honestly, I’m not sure I have the right words to describe this book. Or my feelings toward it. Let’s just say that as someone who grew up Catholic, with years spent questioning faith and religion, it hit home for me in a way that I was not expecting.

The overall vibes not only felt like a darker fantasy with a unique magic system (or maybe more a unique system of controlling magic), but also like it was a gothic horror novel. The atmosphere felt very dark, laced with dusty threads of memory and an almost oppressive feeling, as if all of the walls were caving in around you, even though the characters are often surrounded by large expanses of open space. The scenes in the Abbey recall images of heavy incense and chanted prayers and ritual designed to invoke awe, if not answers.

The Sacred Space Between questions the ideas of Saints, of the control of the Church, of how to wield power to maintain control. It uses Jude and Maeve – our exiled Saint and our devout Iconographer – as our guides to unravel the threads that bind religion and faith, and to show that those questions that haunt the back of your mind are there for a reason. Faith can be transformative, but pure blind faith can also harm. Using memory as the key magic focus here lends incredibly well to the themes, to showing how quickly people can be corrupted and led into frenzy if they have no idea of anything else every happening in the world around them.

The book is going to stick with me for a very long time. Coming out on the other side of it is like one of my favorite lines from the book – “[it’s like] a lungful of air after a lifetime underwater.”