Ami Sands Brodoff chooses an inherently weighty subject for her novel The White Space Between. Any discussion of the legacy of the Holocaust and its victims draws heavily on cultural history, and carries a certain built-in gravitas.

Brodoff’s story is about the relationship between a mother, Jana, who survived the camps, and her daughter, Willow, from whom she has hidden a great deal of her past in the hope of protecting her from the world’s evils. The novel examines the way that we create our identities from the stories we tell about our past, and questions the point at which the truth pushes its way out from the safe haven of denial. Unfortunately, the quality of the writing often detracts from the force of the story.

The structure of the narrative, a slow reveal of Jana’s past as Willow hunts for her mother’s secrets, interspersed with flashbacks to Willow’s childhood and Jana’s time in Auschwitz, is well-paced and simmers gradually to a full boil. But this tension is repeatedly broken by unnecessary exposition of the characters’ emotional states. For example, every time Jana eats a bagel, “the taste and the smell make [her] feel all the changes from misery back to happiness that we all go through.” Brodoff doesn’t trust her writing to imply – or the reader to infer – any key emotion or tonal shift based on the situations alone.

Also, her writing suffers from ill-chosen metaphors and clumsy, cliché-ridden dialogue. There is “a bum ticker” and an “old haunt.” We learn that “truer words were never spoken.” And Jana communicates her foreignness by putting verbs at the end of sentences, despite the fact that she studied at McGill, teaches in the U.S., and corrects her daughter’s grammar in a flashback in the second chapter. The overly broad strokes, drafty style, and reliance on cliché and exposition sap the characters of depth and weaken the narrative’s  ultimate revelation.