47 pages • 1 hour read
Katherine ArdenSmall Spaces
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
That morning in homeroom, Ollie persists in reading Small Spaces during Mr. Easton’s class. She has reached the part where Caleb returns to the farm. Beth says he looks cold and blue, like someone who has drowned. Caleb has no memory of the previous night. Beth writes, “Only the look in his eyes had changed, and he would not say where he had been. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said” (50). After Caleb’s return, Beth and Jonathan get married, go on their honeymoon, and have a daughter. Their lives are happy for decades until one night in the autumn when Jonathan declares that the smiling man has come back.
Ollie’s reading is interrupted as Mr. Easton tells everyone about the farm they are about to visit. Misty Valley Farm has belonged to the same family for generations. It’s a small-scale, eco-tourism operation that now caters to visitors and is doing very well as a result. Coco urges Mr. Easton to talk about the ghost stories associated with the place. This catches Ollie’s interest because the family that owns the farm bears an eerie similarity to the characters in Ollie’s book.
Easton says that two brothers disappeared, and their bodies were never found, but neighbors say that the property is haunted: “The woman herself didn’t live long after her husband vanished. Throughout her final illness, she swore that her husband wasn’t dead, that he was still on the farm” (55). The neighbors now say the wife also haunts the farm, looking for Jonathan and Caleb. Ollie dismisses all these parallels as coincidence.
Easton continues to describe another strange event at the farm. A descendent named Garrett Webster tried running a back-to-nature arts and crafts school on the property. One night, his schoolhouse caught fire. Several children died because they had stayed late to rehearse a play. No human remains were ever found in the rubble. Webster himself moved away and never returned. Five years ago, Linda Webster, another descendent, came to the farm. She renamed it Misty Valley even though the original name was Smoke Hollow. This also corresponds to the name in Ollie’s book.
Chapter 7 Summary
After his lecture, Easton leads all the children to the school bus. Their regular driver isn’t there, and Ollie dislikes the new driver, Mr. Jones, a farmhand at Misty Valley. Ollie says of him, “He was big, with a thick gray beard. In fact, he was sort of gray all over. Gray-white. Mushroom-colored. Except his lips were red” (61).
Ollie is forced to take the only empty seat on the bus next to Brian. She suspects he saved the seat for her, but he blushes and denies this fact when she asks him. Ollie shrugs off Brian’s odd behavior and goes back to reading her book. In it, Jonathan has just explained to Beth that he must go with the smiling man because they made a bargain. If Jonathan doesn’t go with him, the smiling man will take Caleb instead. Jonathan has promised to stay with him “until the mist becomes rain” (64).
Ollie’s reading is again interrupted when Brian tries to initiate a conversation with her. At first, she is rude to him until he begins to quote passages from Alice in Wonderland, which intrigues Ollie. As the school bus arrives at the entrance to Misty Valley Farm, all the students are struck by the number of scarecrows decorating the property. Ollie thinks they all look sinister. As the class exits the bus, the owner is waiting to greet everyone. Ollie is shocked to realize that owner is the same woman who tried to throw Small Spaces into Lethe Creek the day before.
Chapter 8 Summary
Today, Linda Webster doesn’t look crazed and wild-eyed. She seems perfectly normal, but Ollie steers clear to avoid being recognized as the girl who stole her book. As Linda discusses eco-tourism with the sixth graders, Ollie notices that the owner flinches away from Mr. Jones. She seems slightly frightened of him. Ollie once again thinks that his skin reminds her of mushrooms. Then, she thinks of a happy mushroom-picking expedition with her mother as the class is led off for a tour.
Chapter 9 Summary
The group enters the milking barn, where a placid cow is about to be milked by a handsome young farmhand named Seth. Everyone is curious about the process until Coco trips over a milk pail and falls on her face. In the laughter and confusion that follow, Ollie slips outside. She wanders past the vegetable garden and its collection of creepy scarecrows until she finds herself at the gate of the family cemetery.
There are four graves for Caleb, Jonathan, Cathy, and Beth. As Ollie contemplates the strange connection with her book, Mr. Jones comes up behind her and starts to sing a nursery rhyme about two brothers who go out to play but only one returns at the end of the day:
Jon, my dear, said their kind mother
Where on earth is your little brother?
Don’t know? Oh, foolish child
Enough nonsense, you are exiled
Till you bring him home for supper (81).
Jones says there are four graves but only two bodies, implying that Jonathan and Caleb are still missing. When Ollie starts walking away, Jones adds, “Listen, girl […]. There’s no time. Four graves, three stones, two sets of bones. But all four souls unquiet. The mist comes off the creek when the year’s turning and—” (81). Jones is interrupted by the arrival of Seth, who escorts Ollie back to the horse barn to catch up with the rest of the class.
Chapter 10 Summary
It’s time for lunch, and the farm has an outdoor bread oven that produces delicious loaves. Linda is ladling out some equally tasty tomato soup. When it’s Ollie’s turn for soup, she stands in front of Linda and apologizes for taking Small Spaces. Ollie promises to return the book when she’s done. Linda seems shaken to see her again but denies that they ever met or that she knows anything about a book.
As Ollie eats lunch, Coco sits down and tries to thank her for intervening in the schoolyard the day before. When Ollie brushes her off, Coco tactlessly speculates that Ollie likes to be alone because her mother died. Ollie replies, “None of your business! […]. ‘Or don’t you have any brain at all in your stupid pink head?” (89). Then, she abruptly leaves the table.
Chapter 11 Summary
As the class lines up to board the bus at the end of the day, Easton comments to Jones about how much work it must have taken to assemble all the scarecrows. Jones says they’ve always been on the farm: “Mr. Easton looked interested. ‘They are in such good condition,’ he said. ‘I wonder how old they are.’ The bus driver just shrugged and smiled. He was still looking at Ollie. ‘Old enough,’ he said. ‘Old enough’” (91).
Back on the bus, Ollie resumes reading her book. In it, Beth is now talking about Jonathan’s disappearance. She searches for days, but her husband is gone. Caleb confesses that Jonathan took his place. He says that the smiling man pulled him out of the water after he drowned. Caleb knows how to go where Jonathan is so he won’t be lonely. Provoked by his nonsense, Beth tells him to go to Jonathan and never return. Caleb leaves and is never seen again.
Ollie stops reading when she notices that the trip back is taking a very long time. A dense fog has descended, and the bus creeps along at a snail’s pace before it breaks down completely. At this point, Jones makes the strange announcement, “‘Best get moving. At nightfall they’ll come for the rest of you.’ Then he smiled, tongue flicking red against his teeth” (96).
Chapters 6-11 Analysis
This segment contains two stories running in parallel. Now that Ollie has confiscated Small Spaces, she becomes enthralled with the book. Many passages are quoted verbatim as she reads snippets here and there. The story unfolding in Small Spaces begins to dovetail with Ollie’s own experiences related to her class field trip to Misty Valley Farm. She discovers the real-life connection between Beth’s story and the class’s destination that day. The Webster surname is the same. Ollie can’t dismiss the parallels as mere coincidence as she continues to be struck by the oddities on the farm since the bus driver and Linda are off-putting despite Seth’s reassuring presence.
As Ollie immerses herself ever deeper into Small Spaces, the segment shifts to the theme of Clinging to the Past. Beth explains that Jonathan wanted to find his brother and restore their fraternal bond. However, trying to repair a past injury carries unexpected consequences. While Beth rejoices at her brother-in-law’s return, something isn’t quite right. She says, “The next day, Caleb came back. He was pale and blue-lipped; his eyes were strange and distant. I remember thinking, with a shiver, that a drowned man breathed back to life would look like him” (50).
Beth’s perception is accurate, as she will learn later in the story. The smiling man has restored Caleb to physical form, but Jonathan’s refusal to let his brother die is a hollow victory. Caleb has returned in body, but his spirit is gone. He is a scarecrow in disguise. Scarecrows in the novel represent the theme of clinging to the past. When Ollie gets her first glimpse of the farm, she is struck by the disturbing sight of multiple scarecrows:
More scarecrows. Scarecrows everywhere. Someone had set up scarecrows between buildings, in the vegetable garden, on stakes in the cornfield. Their hands were trowels or garden rakes. Their smiles had been sewn or painted on. Scarecrows, Ollie thought uneasily, should not be used for decoration (70).
Ollie is unnerved by the vacant expression on the scarecrows’ faces. They are made to look like humans, but they aren’t, any more than Caleb is a living, breathing man. They cling to a human shape just as Jonathan clings to his dead brother and tries to infuse life back into him by making a deal with the smiling man. The author pays particular attention to describing the hands of scarecrows. They are made of garden implements and will later be used to grab and snatch children. Metaphorically, they symbolize the clinging associated with holding onto a past that is gone.
Ollie embodies this theme in her attempts to hold onto something else that is gone. The reader is still unaware of what she has lost that she so desperately wants returned. However, she gives additional indications in this segment of her internal distress: “Mr. Easton looked concerned. ‘Did you need some quiet time?’ Ollie suddenly wanted to yell. Quiet time, always quiet time, as if she could make her own head and heart be quiet” (85). Ollie is inwardly consumed with the need to suppress feelings related to past grief. At another point, she reveals her emotional state a bit more clearly: “‘No. I don’t hate anyone.’ That was true. She just didn’t care enough to try to be friends anymore. She hadn’t cared about much of anything in almost a year. She looked down again, finding her place on the page” (88).
This comment offers some clarification to the reader regarding Ollie’s behavior. She doesn’t want to interact with others and wishes to bury herself in books so that she doesn’t have to care. In the final pages of the segment, Coco finally articulates the problem: “‘Why do you sit by yourself?’ asked Coco. Ollie said nothing. ‘Is it because your mom died?’ Coco pressed” (88). Ollie reacts aggressively to this observation by insulting Coco and walking away. By asking the question out loud, Coco has made Ollie’s mother’s death real. A traumatic event she suppressed for a year has come boiling to the surface. Ollie’s life has now become the parallel of Jonathan’s. At this point in the story, she would do anything to get her mother back, which makes her an ideal target for the smiling man.
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