ARC provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Having read The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden already I couldn't wait to try her middle grade book when i saw this pop up on netgalley yesterday. 

I read this in one sitting today. I loved the growing friendship dynamic between the main characters, Ollie, Coco and Brian. Especially the character arc that Ollie goes through. This was engaging and I could not put it down. I recommend this to children and adults alike. This takes you on a whirlwind of a ride and is up there with one of my favourite middle grade stories ever!!

I have just bought the hardback to support the author and have pre-ordered the second book in the series which is called Dead Voices.

100% recommend 🙂👍

What a fun and spooky middle grade debut! Arden has created lovable and very real, relatable characters in an eerie rural farm town, reminiscent of the dozens of R.L. Stine books I devoured as a child. I can't wait to see what the second installment in the series holds for Ollie, Coco, and Brian. Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review!

Katherine Arden's creepy, atmospheric ghost story will be a pleasure to recommend to middle school students who want to read something scary. The three main characters are so different from each other yet grow as friends and individuals.
Ollie is still grieving deeply after the death of her mom. Brian is a star hockey player with a secret reading life. Coco is new to rural Vermont from the city and a prime target for teasing. When the sixth grade class goes on a field trip to a local farm, the trip home becomes a nightmare. Ollie leads Coco and Brian off the bus into an adventure that will test their skills and imagination. This is a great book to read under the covers with a flashlight.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the chance to read in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher I was able to read this book in exchange for an honest review.
***
Small Spaces by Katherine Arden is a delightful creepy middle school read about 6th grader Ollie.
Ollie is quiet and likes her books and numbers more than she likes dealing with other people, especially when people are still giving her the sympathy face over the loss of her mother. When Ollie rescues a book from being tossed into the river she gets more than she bargained for when she’s told to avoid large spaces at night and to hide in small spaces and as she reads the book she discovers a chilling story about missing people and a smiling man who makes bargains. But it’s just a story right?
Ollie is a fun character, she is quiet, smart and brave. Her companions Coco, an accident prone but sweet girl, and Brian, field hockey champion and popular guy, help compliment her and she them as they try to solve the mystery they find themselves in as scarecrows come alive and try to capture them. Where are they, can they save themselves and their classmates, and who is the smiling man?
I breezed through this book, I loved it so much. A fantastic read.

I'm far from being a kid but it didn't stop me from enjoying the book. I love the author and I had a little time before my next book was ready so I wanted to give it a quick read. Now I'm looking forward to the next book.

I downloaded this book because It sounds really interesting. But the formatting on my kindle is so bad I can’t get past it. I know this is a proof not the final copy but it is unreadable for me.

I loved it! From the beginning to finish, I liked everything about it. My last reads weren't that great, so I really needed a good book to lift my spirits and this one definitely did the job.
The story is so intriguing and the plot just sucks you in. Also the characters are wonderful. They mature and form a closer bond through their nightmare school trip, and what a trip it was. This book is all about adventure, friendship and love. These things can shine the light even in the darkest places.
What an amazing story!

A delightfully creepy middle-grade novel! Ollie (a sixth grade math genius who has lost her interest in everything except reading in the wake of her mother's death) is a wonderfully plucky heroine and I greatly enjoyed her two unexpected sidekicks: Coco, the new girl who cries too easily and is predictably a favorite target for bullies, and Brian, the hockey-playing popular kid who turns out to be a supremely well-prepared Boy Scout. The mystery/ghost story manages to be fun, compelling and meaningful all at the same time. Strongly recommend to middle-grade readers who like things a little spooky but want character development as well.

Wow what a fun quick read! This is totally something my younger self would have been all over! As an adult I still really enjoyed it but I can only imagine what I would have thought as the targeted age group! I would reccomend this to both kids and adults.

I would give this book 500 stars if I could. I loved it. It was paced very well, I was drawn to the characters, and it scared the me in the way only the best “scary” books really do.

The story of Ollie was captivating and inspiring. She is at once strong and innocently childlike in a way that makes me root for her and want to protect her at the same time. This feeling adds so much to the feel of the book - it makes you feel invested, powerless, and hopeful all at once and makes the horror of the story much more real. Even as an adult, I was on edge when reading this at night. It was exactly what I wanted and more than I expected.

This is one of those books that I will remember fondly for a long time and one that I will use to measure other books for quite a while!

Small Spaces is a creepy and eerie but oh so fun fantasy middle grade novel that I adored to pieces. I was expecting it to be a quick and easy read,which it was,but it also had deeper themes in it, such as depression, grief, bullying. The main character is book lover which is relatable) But she was also smart and brave yet down to earth. The friendship in this book was so cute and I can't wait to see more of it in book two. Also, the villain and the scarecrows- totally creepy!
Thank you to netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review

This is the most spookiest Middle Grade book I've ever read. But the story and characters were so good that I couldn't out it down or stop reading it. Thank you to the publishers for sending me an arc and I will definitely be reading more of Katherine Arden's books! Like read soon. I don't think I have anything negative to say about this book. The story moved pretty good and there weren't any slow parts and characters did learn from things so I give this a 5/5 stars. Yes I loved it.

Katherine Arden arrived into my reading world with her first novel The Bear and the Nightingale, one of my favorite debuts in years. It was the first volume of a trilogy set in medieval Russia that dealt with the collision between folklore and religion, between past and present, between men and women, and between magic and faith. And it did so in one of the lushest, richest worlds I can remember. So I was going to read anything else she wrote, simply based off of that. Of course, who would have expected that her next book would be a middle-grade ghost story?

But of course Small Spaces is great – what else would I have expected from Arden? And if the story is simple in many ways – a necessity of the genre – that doesn’t keep Arden from working within its confines to make something that still feels inventive and rich somehow, with characters just as lively and thoughtful as her adult works.

That richness is evident early on, as Arden introduces us to our protagonist, an eleven-year-old girl named Ollie, who’s still recovering from a painful loss and is pushing away everyone around her in the process. That feels like a familiar trope, but Arden makes Ollie her own character, with a love of numbers and reading that both set her apart, as well as an endearing prickliness that’s both amusing and plausible. But Arden’s not content to just give us a great heroine, and starts carefully fleshing out the supporting cast, turning what we thought might be a generic bully character into something far more interesting, the token “new girl” into her own wonderful little person, and Ollie’s dad into a man we can see existing outside of Ollie’s world. That Arden does all of that while never veering off of her story or spending excess time on it is all the more testament to her skills and care as a writer.

Of course, if you’re making a middle grade horror novel, the important thing your target audience cares about isn’t the characters – it’s the scares. And Small Spaces delivers those nicely, giving even this adult reader some serious creeps while never steering out of the age-appropriate range. The story seems simple enough, with a school bus breaking down in the middle of a deep fog and the sudden appearance of a distressingly large number of scarecrows, but Arden has a lot going on there – more than it seems at first – keeping the plot moving at a rapid pace while escalating the scares in satisfying ways. (Seriously, these are some creepy scarecrows, you guys.)

Small Spaces feels a little rushed and tidy at the end – maybe a bit necessitated by the genre, but it still feels like a weak ending to an otherwise great story. But it’s not so weak that it ruins the book as a whole, and the book’s many other pleasures – great characters, emotional richness, great pacing, and eerie mood – are more than enough to leave you satisfied with the read you got. Knowing that she’s already got another story set in this world to come? That’s just icing on the cake.

ARC kindly provided by Netgalley and publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions expressed below are purely my own.

Rating: 4.5/5

I really enjoyed the journey the author created for Olivia (the MC) in this book. The plot tied in nicely, moving from a long-lost story to the present, where both worlds are fated to collide. Olivia is a 6th grader who recently lost her mother and is struggling with her emotions. She has withdrawn herself into the books that she reads and so when she comes across a woman crying hysterically by a lake, about to toss a book into the adjoining river, Olivia steals the book from her. She races away from the woman only to hear the words: stick to small spaces at night, stay away from large ones. In the book Olivia retrieves from said woman, she learns about the cursed past of a family in a farm. A husband had to make a promise to the "smiling man" to get his lost brother back. In the real world, Olivia's class visits a neighboring farm with a sinister history of its own. At first, she ignores the connections she sees between both, until she can no longer ignore the eerie, creeping mists, the increasing amount of scarecrows around the farm, or the fact that her school bus breaks down in the most inopportune of places. Will she put together the clues fast enough to make it out alive?

School children will love this book- I book talked it during this summer's SRA and every time I was met with silence, children eating up every single word! I can now say that most of the county's titles are either checked out or on hold!

I read Katherine Arden’s award-winning The Bear and the Nightingale earlier this year and loved it, so when I learned that she has also written a middle-grade ghost story I hoped it would be just as good and immediately added it to my list of Halloween reads. I wasn’t disappointed.

Small Spaces is about an eleven-year-old bookworm named Ollie who is living with depression and grief after the loss of her mother. All Ollie wants to do is hide away and read instead of dealing with school and other kids, so when she goes down to read at the creek after school and finds a seemingly mad woman about to throw a book away into the water, she snatches it and takes it home. In its pages, she finds a 100-year-old memoir written by a woman whose husband and brother-in-law made a deal with The Smiling Man and vanished from their farm. On a school trip to a local farm the very next day, Ollie discovers more and more similarities between the book and the farm, and she begins to wonder if she and her classmates might become the next chapter.

This is an amazingly atmospheric book. Katherine Arden paints the ominous landscape of Misty Valley Farm so perfectly that you can imagine yourself there, and The Smiling Man and his legion of followers are creepy enough to haunt your thoughts for weeks after reading – and make you suspicious of any scarecrows you might see. I did find myself wishing for a few more details, however. What was the bargain surrounding the first class of children who disappeared and what really happened to Caleb when he vanished? I also hope we one day get a sequel, perhaps when Ollie has grown up, as the ending suggests there is much more to come from these characters.

This was my first middle grade book and it was so good ya’ll! Katherine Arden did a great job one with this one. It was easily spooky and grabbed my attention.

Our story starts with our main character Ollie stopping a woman from throwing a book in the water. She warns her to stick to the small spaces but Ollie isn’t sure what she’s talking about. She starts to read this book only to find out that things in the book may be truer than she realizes.

Ollie was grieving over losing her mother. She engrossed herself in books and dropped out of her school activities. Along the way, she starts to work her way through the grief and actually learn to let people again. I really did enjoy the friendship that formed between Ollie, Brian, and Coco.

The best part about this book was the atmosphere! It just felt like autumn and it did have that spooky vibe.
This was pretty darn spooky book even though it’s middle grade. It could just be that I’m a scaredy cat, but I found myself reading with my bedside lamp on! There were twists that I didn’t see coming, especially towards the end!

This book was a fun read that I recommend everyone read! It will definitely give you those fall vibes. Grab a PSL and enjoy!