"Thomas has crafted a meticulously documented study that is theoretically sound, insightful, and nimbly written. This monograph will be of great interest to a wide readership, especially those interested in Iberian Studies and film criticism. As such, Thomas’s monograph on in-betweenness and childhood in selected films from the Long Transition is a welcome contribution to the field."
John Margenot, Hispania
"The innovative and convincing interpretations of Inhabiting the In-Between recommend themselves to the reader with an insistence upon the narrative and psychological complexity of these films. Beyond its substantial contribution to Spanish film studies, this book urges one to be aware that the liminality of childhood and adolescence is brief, irretrievable, and when neglected, can amount to a missed opportunity."
Elizabeth Scarlett, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos
"Sarah Thomas’ Inhabiting the In-Between is a beautifully written study of a still under-examined period in Spain’s recent history, the Transition to Democracy, that trains its focus on the emergent figure of the child protagonist in the lesser-known works by art house and lesser-studied popular cinema directors. Thomas grounds the child in national moments of import as she follows film scholars Vicky LeBeau, Karen Lury, and Emma Wilson in exploring this figure in filmic and philosophical inquiry that inflects, in varying degrees, the bildungsfilm, the haptic and the gaze, biopolitics, historical memory, queer studies, and cultural geography beyond the bounds of Iberian film and history. As this list suggests, Inhabiting the In-Between exhibits a productive interdisciplinary, or fluid theoretical inbetweenness."
Erin K. Hogan, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Ciberletras
"Inhabiting the In-Between is perceptive, original, clearly written, and a welcome addition to the slim collection of innovative studies of Spanish films during the transition from Dictatorship to Democracy."
Soledad Fox Maura, Williams College, The Seminary Co-op
"Beyond its substantial contribution to Spanish film studies, this book urges one to be aware that the liminality of childhood and adolescence is brief, irretrievable, and when neglected, can amount to a missed opportunity."
Elizabeth Scarlett, State University of New York at Buffalo, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos
"In its development of thought-provoking concepts such as the ‘child other,’ Inhabiting the In-Between provides a lucid reappraisal of Spanish film during this period. Thorough, meticulous, and engaging, Sarah Thomas demonstrates a probing and broad-ranging understanding of scholarship on representations of childhood in film and childhood studies more generally, making a significant contribution to the field of Spanish cinema studies."
Tom Whittaker, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick
"Covering literature on the child in Spanish and Latin American cinema, childhood studies, Spanish cinema studies, and film studies, Sarah Thomas pushes at the boundaries of these fields with this nuanced, highly sophisticated work. In this thrilling study, the child is presented as liminal, ambiguous and elusive, in careful, meticulous scholarship underpinning readings which are exhilarating and profound. The child is seen as an amalgam of often illusory meditations on the relationship of the past to the present and the self to the other – the perfect icon for our shifting understandings of Spain’s long Transition to democracy."
Sarah Wright, School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Royal Holloway University of London