Small Spaces

Gr 5–8—After experiencing a terrible loss, Ollie doesn't care about math and softball anymore. She just wants to crawl into a book and ignore everything around her. Which is why when she runs into a woman crying and about to throw a book into the creek, Ollie jumps into action and saves it! The book, Small Spaces, is about a woman named Beth, the Webster brothers who wanted to marry her, and the disappearance of one of the brothers after he makes a horrible bargain with the smiling man. Ollie's fascinated, especially the next day when her class visits a farm and the crying woman is the farm's owner. Ollie also sees the Websters' headstones at the farm cemetery! Is the story real? And why would the bus driver tell her to avoid large spaces and keep to small ones at night? When the bus breaks down and it starts to get dark, Ollie must decide whether to listen to her teacher, her peers, the bus driver, or her broken watch which is now telling her to run. Renee Dorian's pacing and inflection sets the mood and keeps the story moving.