Livingston Parish Library discussion
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Small Spaces
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Something in BeTWEEN-Small Spaces
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Born in Austin, Texas, Katherine Arden spent her junior year of high school in Rennes, France. Following her acceptance to Middlebury College in Vermont, she deferred enrollment for a year in order to live and study in Moscow. At Middlebury, she specialized in French and Russian literature. After receiving her BA, she moved to Maui, Hawaii, where she worked every kind of odd job imaginable, from grant writing and making crêpes to serving as a personal tour guide. After a year on the island, she moved to Briançon, France, and spent nine months teaching. She then returned to Maui, stayed, got restless, and left again to wander. Currently she lives in Vermont, but really, you never know.
About the book:
2019-2020 LYRC book, reading level 4.1 = 6 AR points
After suffering a tragic loss, eleven-year-old Ollie only finds solace in books. 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. 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.
Ollie is captivated by the tale until her school trip the next day to Smoke Hollow, a local farm with a haunting history all its own. There she stumbles upon the graves of the very people she’s been reading about. Could it be the story about the smiling man is true? Ollie doesn’t have too long to think about the answer to that. On the way home, the school bus breaks down, sending their teacher back to the farm for help. But the strange bus driver has some advice for the kids left behind in his care: “Best get moving. At nightfall they’ll come for the rest of you.” Nightfall is, indeed, fast descending when Ollie’s previously broken digital wristwatch, a keepsake reminder of better times, begins a startling countdown and delivers a terrifying message: RUN.
Only Ollie and two of her classmates heed the bus driver’s warning. As the trio head out into the woods–bordered by a field of scarecrows that seem to be watching them–the bus driver has just one final piece of advice for Ollie and her friends: “Avoid large places. Keep to small.”
And with that, a deliciously creepy and hair-raising adventure begins.
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1.Why was it safer to “avoid large spaces at night” and “keep to small when the mist rises”?
2.Why was the woman by the creek throwing away a book, and why did Ollie stop her? Could you let someone throw a book into the river?
3.What was the weird things about the tragedy at the barn, the thing they couldn’t find?
4.How were there, at the cemetery by the farm, four graves, three stones, but only two sets of bones?”
5.What was the last book you “wanted so badly to read it felt like it was burning a hole” in your “backpack”? What about the book made it so?
6.Could the scarecrows move in the daytime? What were some of their limitations? Why did they have to stay in the sunshine world too?
7.With whom did Ollie trade food for answers? Why did it work?
8.What warnings did Ollie's watch give? Why was the watch so special to her
9.Why was it good that Ollie had stood up for Coco and befriended her?
10.Why did Coco cry so often? Was she actually weak, or something else that Ollie hadn’t realized before?
11.What did the smiling man try to bargain with Olivia?
12.What did “mist for capturing, water for freeing” mean?
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“You can't hide in your books forever. There are all kinds of people, and good things, and life, just waiting for you.”
― Katherine Arden, Small Spaces
Small Spaces By: Katherine Arden.
Discussion questions and bio will be posted throughout the months of September and October. Thoughts and comments about the book may be posted at any time.