So I’d read Katherine Arden’s debut Winternight trilogy to its completion before I picked up this book, and just from The Bear and the Nightingale, I knew she did really well when it came to writing atmospheric scenes.

As she begins to read the slender volume, Ollie discovers a chilling story about a girl named Beth, the two brothers who both loved her, and a peculiar deal made with “the smiling man,” a sinister specter who grants your most tightly held wish, but only for the ultimate price. So when she happens upon a crazed woman at the river threatening to throw a book into the water, Ollie doesn’t think–she just acts, stealing the book and running away. TERRIFIED.Īfter suffering a tragic loss, eleven-year-old Ollie only finds solace in books.

I love the season.My mind blew up and now I cannot unsee the merged image in my mind of the scarecrows in this book and weeping angels in Doctor Who and I. ( It might be too early to start reading Halloween stuff, but I don’t even care. I just may have connected to it and enjoyed it more if it hadn’t been a middle grade read. But the story did wrap up well, and I’m still excited to read the next book in the series. The first half of the book was so atmospheric with a ghost story, a haunted farm, a corn maze, autumn food, and a lot more, it would have received a solid 5 stars from me, but the second half had Ollie and her friends going from here to there trying to find their way out of this other ‘world’ without much else going for it. With scarecrows, a creepy bus driver, and the same old lady on the farm that Ollie had stolen a book from, Ollie finds herself having to solve her very own mystery. At the same time, her class is due for a field trip to the Misty Valley Farm, which, Ollie starts noticing, has a lot of similarities to the farm in her book. Over the next day, Ollie becomes engrossed in the ghost story within the book that also contains a mystery of two missing boys on a farm in Smoke Hollow. Ollie stops her and takes the book for herself while the woman gives her an eerie warning to avoid large places at night and to stick to small spaces.

One day, she is on her way home from school when she sees an old woman who is attempting to throw a book into the water. It takes place in a small town in Vermont during October where Ollie, who is in the sixth grade and has recently suffered a loss, lives. This was such a spooky and atmospheric read for the Halloween season.

Katherine arden small spaces book 4