Small Spaces by Katherine Arden

Title: Small Spaces

Author: Katherine Arden

Pages: 218

Finished: February 6, 2019

First Sentence: October in East Evansburg, and the last warm sun of the year slanted red through the sugar maples.

Summary: Ollie escapes from a tragedy by reading. She loves books. So when she finds a woman trying to throw a book into the river, Ollie saves the book without thinking. Said book turns out to be a ghost story of a farm with a horrible love triangle and someone named the Smiling Man at the center. Things get weird when Ollie's class goes on a field trip to a farm that used to belong to the people in Ollie's book. And when on the way home their bus mysteriously breaks down and the bus driver tells Ollie to stick to "small spaces," well, that's when things get really spooky.

Thoughts: Do you ever have those times when things seem to match up in your life? I've been waiting for Katherine Arden's third installment of her Bear and the Nightengale trilogy. I was so excited for it and knew it would be coming out sometime in January. Also in January, I was browsing some Middle Grade fiction lists for work. The cover of this book caught my attention. I read the review and decided it was worth a try. It wasn't until after I checked it out that I realized it was written by the same woman!

I really enjoyed this little story. It was sufficiently creepy enough to keep me going, though I will admit, I guessed who the Smiling Man was pretty early on. That didn't really affect the story for me too much though. The creatures were creepy. I also liked how the kids were real kids. None of them was particularly mature for their age. No one acted beyond their years. It made the whole story so much more believable to my 30 something year old self. As believable as a ghost story is.

Definitely a worthwhile addition to middle grade horror.