It threatens to ruin her budding relationship with Morgan Fisher before it even starts.

It clouds her friendships and swamps her fragile sense of self. I know now I made them up.” Tash, Small Spaces. It doesn’t matter how I think I remember those events. “Sparrow didn’t climb into my bedroom at Ally’s house, or lock me in a box, or steal Mallory from the Greenwillow Carnival. It makes her question everything she thinks she knows – about what happened, about herself. Especially when she finds the mobile phone of her ‘frenemy’ Rachel in her own pocket after Rachel is attacked. This idea that she is mentally unbalanced, maybe even psychotic, haunts her. Thrills and chillsĮven Tash considers herself damaged goods. And one has the entire town – including her own parents – thinking she’s a bit, well, not quite right. A memory that has put her in therapy for years. It’s a memory that everyone she knows keeps telling her is only in her head. She’s haunted by frightening childhood memories of watching a man named Sparrow, a man who’s meant to be imaginary, abduct another little girl from a carnival. But this YA novel from Melbourne-dweller Epstein isn’t just regular creepy it’s hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck kind of creepy … and then some.įrom the opening pages, it’s clear 17-year-old Tash Carmody is in a bad way. In the final pages of her debut book, author Sarah Epstein describes Small Spaces as a “creepy little novel”.

Small spaces by sarah epstein