Small Spaces (Katherine Arden)

Small Spaces
Katherine Arden
Puffin Books
Fiction, MG Fantasy/Horror
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Last year, Ollie had a normal life, with an adventurous mother and an artistic father and friends, attending softball practice and chess club meetings. This year, everything's wrong, and has been since their family of three became a family of two. Shutting out everyone, even her father, she buries herself in books, her only steadfast friends. Books, after all, never talk to her like she's a fragile eggshell or give her the dreaded "sympathy face"... which is why she was so horrified the day she found the madwoman about to throw a book into the creek. Ollie snatches it from the woman and flees. It's a strange book titled "Small Spaces", which tells a strange, sad ghost story of two quarreling brothers, a tragedy, and a terrible bargain made with the Smiling Man who emerged from the mists after sundown. Only by hiding in small spaces after dark can one avoid his terrible minions.
When Ollie's sixth-grade class takes a trip to the local organic farm, things start seeming awfully familiar to her from the book, down to the names on the stones in the rundown graveyard. And when the bus breaks down on the way back to school and the teacher vanishes into the darkness, a strange mist creeps in... Now Ollie and a couple of unlikely classmates are caught in a ghost story of their own - but "Small Spaces" had no happy ending. Will their story end badly, too?

REVIEW: Small Spaces is a solid middle-grade horror tale of regret, loss, and the folly of bargains made on misty nights with smiling strangers. Ollie is having trouble processing the death of her mother, a woman so full of love and life that it seems impossible that either could simply stop existing in a single terrible moment. Her grief turns to anger and resentment at her classmates and teachers and even her own father at times, and the more anyone tries to help, the more she lashes out. The little black book's tale offers echoes of her own life-warping grief and the lengths some people will go to in order to cling to something that is lost - and the terrible price that effort exacts, often paid by others. Still, she's not so far gone that she's entirely oblivious, and she soon realizes that there's something very not right about Misty Hollow Farm and its staff... not to mention the numerous creepy scarecrows dotting the fields and gardens, scarecrows that become much more creepy (and ambulatory) after sundown. She has two companions essentially forced on her by circumstance, the last two people in the class she'd ever want with her - clumsy new girl Coco, with her pink hair and babbly mouth, whom nobody really likes, and popular hockey star Brian, whom Ollie always took for a brainless jock - but they turn into a decent team in their struggle to escape the Smiling Man's dark world, also helping her process the grief she's been avoiding. The tale does a pretty good job ratcheting up the tension and generating scares and conjuring spooky imagery, building up to a fine finale. (And I give marks to the audio presentation; even when the narrator dropped into creepy, creaky voices, the sound quality was decent.) The ending itself feels a little neat, given what everyone went through, but wraps things up well enough.

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