Sean Conway

While looking for emergency candles during the throes of a New Hampshire blizzard, 15-year-old Zoey Johansen pokes her head into the chill of her father's attic and finds an innocuous-looking storage container that, upon opening, reveals itself to be a Pandora's Box, spilling the secrets behind her mother's long-held burden of sadness, her father's addiction to odd, cryptic tattoos, and, ultimately, the mysterious empty spaces between them all. 

She's never been able to find home. An only child and the product of long-divorced parents who'd escaped to opposite coasts, Zoey is lost. Even the family photograph framed in their California den looks bogus: Zoey gnawing her lower lip, standing rigid and apart from her stepfather and vulgar stepbrothers, her mother's strained attempt at a manufactured family for naught. Almost on a whim-really to avoid a dreadful vacation with her synthetic family-Zoey escapes California to visit her biological father for the first time in years. But instead of being the dad she needs, he instead asks her if she would simply pretend to be his niece. Soon stuck in an ice-locked New Hampshire town with an emotionally bankrupt man unwilling and unable to fill his role, she all but succumbs to the realization that she is just as rudderless here as she is there. Until a blizzard rolls in, a storage box opens, and The Empty Space Between Stars - like a dark and scabbing wound - closes.