While trying to avoid being captured by animate scarecrows, Ollie learns valuable lessons about coping with loss and avoiding disaster. During a school outing with her classmates, Ollie discovers that the warnings in the book are all too real. The writer cautions the reader about a mysterious creature known as the smiling man who grants wishes but exacts a heavy price. Ollie takes the book home and begins to read the strange story of a farm family that lived in Smoke Hollow a hundred years earlier. When Ollie snatches the book away, the woman warns her of danger and advises the girl to keep to small spaces. Instead, Ollie rides her bike and spends much of her time along the banks of Lethe Creek, immersing herself in reading as an escape from dealing with her mother’s death.ĭuring one of her trips to the creek, Ollie encounters a woman who is about to throw a book into the water. She lives alone with her father and does her best to isolate herself from her classmates and the school activities she once enjoyed. When the story begins, Ollie is having difficulty adjusting to the loss of her mother, who died in a small plane crash a year earlier. Excerpts from this book are incorporated into the novel proper as Ollie reads various passages.

The novel also uses the device of a story within a story as Ollie stumbles across a book called Small Spaces within the novel of the same name. Events are described from the perspective of an 11-year-old sixth grader named Olivia “Ollie” Adler. The author uses a limited third-person narrative technique. The season is autumn, and the principal events in the novel occur a few days before Halloween, but there is a short concluding chapter that takes place a month later, in early December. The novel is set in the small upstate Vermont town of East Evansburg in an unspecified contemporary year. This study guide and page citations refer to the book’s Kindle edition. Small Spaces is categorized as Children’s Fantasy & Supernatural Mystery Books and Children’s Scary Stories. Subsequent titles in the quartet include Dead Voices (2019), Dark Waters (2021), and Empty Smiles (2022).

The first novel in the series made multiple lists for Best Middle-Grade Book of the Year in 2018, including Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, Amazon, and the Chicago Public Library.

Katherine arden small spaces series