Small Spaces

Small Spaces is a novel for middle grade readers by the American writer Katherine Arden, published in 2018.

Its heroine is Ollie, who is eleven and has been living inside books since the death of her mother. The book she takes with her everywhere contains a ghost story about a girl named Beth, the two brothers who both loved her and a deal made with a figure the story calls the smiling man, who grants a wish for a limited time and then collects what he is owed. On the way home from a school trip the bus breaks down next to a farm that looks like the one in the story, and the teachers and the driver begin behaving as though they have been replaced. Arden writes the book as a horror story for younger readers, with the same interest in old bargains and cold country that runs through her novels for adults, and it begins a series in which Ollie and her friends keep running into the same figure.