A review by arielzeit
The Space Between by Brenna Yovanoff

5.0

This is the same Brenna Yovanoff who wrote that creepy (but brilliant) story about the changeling, The Replacement. The heroine/narrator is the daughter of Lilith and Lucifer, and she lives in Hell. But she leaves it to go look for her half-brother who is in charge of helping half-angels on Earth. Then she falls in love with an earthly half-angel herself (of course). What I liked so much about it was that the characters and the relationships were so well thought out; the differences between a demon and a fallen angel or a half demon vs. a half angel were clear and moved the story along. Lucifer, Beelzebub, the angel of Death, Lilith, the Lilim, they were all so different from each other, so well characterized. Hell was so real, a place where the furnace went on at specific times and the flowers were made of metal. Lilith can spy on Earth through any mirror or reflective surface, even shards of glass. It was a great reuse of the Apocryphal  material that I am also interested in. From my point of view (interest in Jewish fantasy) it got less interesting when they introduced the Catholic material about the 7 deadly sins and the 7 virtues and a lot of stuff takes place in a church where the Angel of Death is torturing the heroine's brother.  But that was a small part of it anyway and thus was an amazing vision, beautifully written, tightly plotted.