The Spaces Between Us

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Description

Serena Velasco and her best friend Melody Grimshaw are dying to get out of their shrinking factory town. Until now, they've been coasting, eluding the bleakness of home and the banality of high school. In a rebellious turn, Serena begins to fixate on communism, hoping to get a rise out of her blue-collar factory town. Her Western Civ teacher catches on and gives her an independent study of class and upward mobility-what creates the spaces between us. Meanwhile, Grimshaw sets goals of her own: to make it onto the cheerleading squad, find a job, and dismantle her family's hopeless reputation. But sometimes the biggest obstacles are the ones you don't see coming; Grimshaw's quest for success becomes a fight for survival, and Serena's independent study gets a little too real. With the future of their friendship and their lives on the line, the stakes have never been so high. A Christy Ottaviano Book

Reviews

"Serena is a stunningly realistic and layered protagonist. Her story unfolds in remarkably sharp, vivid prose, and even the least sympathetic characters are rendered with thoughtful complexity. A girl-centered Catcher in the Rye for the 21st century. "--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Beautiful prose emphasizes complex themes of faith, the class system, and personal responsibility. With its impeccably developed characters and hard-hitting narrative, this is an essential purchase for teen and new adult collections."--School Library Journal, starred review

"Readers will be drawn by the plot details of high school life, a desperate road trip, and a tragic ending, while thematic wisdom comes in single lines. . . creating lingering questions and yielding insights that will have readers seeing their own situations differently long after the last page."--The Bulletin

"This is a raw, atmospheric depiction of a complicated relationship. The story unflinchingly faces hard questions about class and friendship, even when the answers are difficult, uncomfortable, or even tragic."--Horn Book

"One of the best parts of the story is its sense of place, which is writ large. Small, broken towns don't get a lot of attention in youth books, but Tolman digs deep, exploring the people who live there, their nightmares as well as their dreams."--Booklist

Author Bio

Stacia Tolman is a writer and freelance editor whose work has appeared in the Keene Sentinel and the Massachussetts Review, among others. She won a New Hampshire State Council of the Arts grant for fiction based on an early excerpt of The Spaces Between Us. A longtime English teacher and school administrator, Stacia lives in New Hampshire.