Bedtime Reading and a One-Sentence Review

There are reviews, and then there are reviews.

Not the kind that arrive in a carefully worded email, or get posted by someone with a glossy Insta page and a colour-coordinated bookshelf.

No. The kind I’m talking about arrives on an ordinary Tuesday night, in a house somewhere, where a father decides —of all the books on all the shelves — to pick up his sister’s novel and read it to his nine-year-old daughter at bedtime.

My brother did that last night.

He chose The Space Between for Ally.

I keep turning that over. He didn’t have to. There are picture books and chapter books and all the beloved, dog-eared stories that live in a child’s bedroom. But he picked mine up, carried it to her room, settled in beside her, and started reading.

That’s not a small thing.

Because here’s what I know about my brother: he doesn’t do anything halfway when it comes to his daughter. Bedtime reading is sacred ground. It’s where he’s intentional, where he pays attention, where he’s thinking — even if unconsciously — is this worth her time? Is this worthy of this moment?

He thought my book was.

He thought The Space Between was good enough to bring into that quiet space between wakefulness and sleep, good enough to offer to a nine-year-old girl who is still deciding what stories she loves and why.

That level of trust from someone who loves you? It’s almost too much to hold.

And then — because the universe has a sense of timing — my niece delivered her verdict.

She is enjoying it, he told me via text. And then “Aunty Jen has a great use of adjectives”.

She is nine.

I’ve been writing for years – reports, submissions and now novels. I’ve chased the right word down long corridors, wrestled sentences into submission, deleted whole paragraphs that were technically fine but somehow not true or overstepped the word limit. And in one sleepy, earnest sentence, a nine-year-old girl told me the words had landed. That she could feel them.

That’s what adjectives do, when they’re working. They don’t just describe — they make you feel the weight of something, the colour of something, the specific ache of a moment you recognise even if you’ve never lived it.

Ally felt that.

And her dad — my brother, who knows her better than anyone — thought she would.

That’s the review I’ll carry the longest.