The narrator of Katie William’s The Space Between Trees is Evie, a sometimes painfully awkward teen who delivers newspapers to the upper class subdivision Hokepe Woods on Sunday mornings. Each week, she finds a way to meet up with Jonah, a young man whose job it is to remove dead animals from the woods so that the residents of the subdivision don’t have to encounter such sights on their leisurely walks. Evie clearly has a crush on Jonah and tries to catch his attention as more than a friend, but seemingly to no avail. One Sunday morning, Jonah enters the woods to find much more that he bargained for: the body of a young, murdered girl. Evie witnesses the recovery of the body and runs home unable to deal with what she’s seen. Evie later finds out that the body is that of her childhood friend and classmate, Elizabeth “Zabet” McCabe. When Evie runs into Zabet’s father at the funeral, she tells him that she and Zabet were best friends, a statement that hasn’t been true for many years. Mr. McCabe then tries to connect with his deceased daughter through her friends: her true best friend Hadley and her childhood friend Evie. Hadley knows the truth and is angry with Evie for her lie, but she doesn’t reveal Evie’s secret to Mr. McCabe and the two eventually become friends in their own right. Hadley becomes obsessed with finding Zabet’s murderer, and Evie is unwittingly taken along for the ride. When Hadley mistakenly thinks that Jonah has hurt Evie, she tricks the two into taking her to the space between trees where Jonah found Zabet’s body. In a misguided attempt to protect Evie and find redemption for her failure to help Zabet, Hadley sets a literal trap for Jonah. In the end, the truth comes out: Hadley and Zabet were meeting guys in the woods, and one of Zabet’s meetings went horribly wrong. The girls kept a list of the guys, but out of fear, Hadley destroyed the list after Zabet’s death. Her obsession with finding Zabet’s killer and her attack on innocent Jonah were both motivated by her own guilt over Zabet’s murder. In the end, Jonah loses a leg, Hadley gets away with her crime, Zabet’s killer is caught, and Mr. McCabe begins to recover from his loss. And Evie is left to carry the burden of the truth.
Personally, I didn’t care for The Space Between Trees. As a teacher, I know there are awkward teens out there like Evie, and I understand the author’s attempt to capture the true character of one of those teens. I, however, found it difficult to connect to Evie. In the end, I could empathize somewhat with the character of Hadley and her struggle with her own guilt over the death of her friend and the poor decisions they both made, but I was troubled by both Hadley and Evie’s (particularly Evie’s) decision to keep the truth about Jonah’s attack a secret. I just felt that the story allowed a great opportunity for growth for both of these characters, but neither of them seemed to learn anything from their experiences, and there were seemingly no consequences for their actions. I guess overall I felt that the author missed an opportunity at the end of the story to provide real meaning to the events, and it made me feel that the time I had devoted to the novel was, to a great extent, wasted.
References
Williams, K. (2010). The space between trees. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.
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