What’s Extraordinary About?

What does it mean to be extraordinary? Phoebe finds herself drawn to Mallory, the strange and secretive new kid in school. Soon the two girls are as close as sisters . . . until Mallory’s magnetic older brother, Ryland, appears. Ryland has an immediate, exciting hold on Phoebe—but a dangerous hold, for she begins to question her feelings about her best friend and, worse, about herself.

Soon she’ll discover the shocking, fantastical truth about Ryland and Mallory, and about an age-old debt they expect Phoebe to pay. Will she be strong enough to resist? Will she be special enough to save herself?

In the vein of Nancy Werlin’s previous novel Impossible, Extraordinary is a tale of friendship, romance, and the faerie realm.

About Writing This Book

So, there I was, watching the musical Wicked (from the novel by Gregory Maguire, musical adaptation by Stephen Schwartz, with book by Winnie Holzman), and we'd gotten to the final scene where the two witches sing their goodbye duet to each other:

Like a stream that meets a boulder

Halfway through the wood

Who can say if I've been changed for the better?

By the time they got to "Because I knew you, I have been changed for good," I was in tears. In my life, I too have experienced that hugely important friendship, and so I knew that I was witnessing that aim of all art: emotional truth.

Wicked and “For Good” made me want to try to write a novel that would go to that same core place. It would be about an enormously important friendship between two teenage girls, one more pivotal than a romantic love affair. This friendship would test both girls to their limits, and would force them to grow, not just into maturity, but into better selves than they could ever have imagined becoming alone.

For this to work, I felt, only a fantasy landscape would do.

Also, full disclosure. I wanted to repair what I saw as a tiny flaw in Wicked: in my view, Elphaba gave Glinda a lot more than she got in return. (And here I’ll reference Holly Black who remarked in a recent speech that all art is in conversation with previous art [July 2010, Vermont College for the Fine Arts]).

But once I began working on my novel about the two teenage girls, one human, one fey, and of their friendship gone dangerously wrong because of some secret (what secret? I’d figure that out later), I had a second idea.

“Why can’t my human girl be Jewish?”

It was a hasty, almost thoughtless choice. I expected my human girl, Phoebe, to be largely secular in her outlook, and so I didn’t anticipate that her religious background would affect the story much.

Truly, all I was thinking about was making some room at the table for girls who, like me as a teenager, loved reading fantasy but sometimes wondered wistfully why there was never anyone like them in it.

But then, as I worked, I discovered that the decision had put me into a strange place of vulnerability and fear, for reasons that I only later began to understand (see Michael Weingrad’s Spring 2010 essay, “Why There Is No Jewish Narnia,” link below).

And so another quick, emotional choice followed: “I’ll not only make Phoebe Jewish, I’ll make her a Rothschild! I’ll make her a member of the most storied Jewish family in modern history!”

I wanted to protect her, I now see. It was pure instinct, because she was going where Jews didn’t go, and where they were—it seemed to my subconscious, which was suddenly demanding to be in charge—not known, not understood, and certainly not welcome.

And then my plot and my characters screeched off in a direction I would never have predicted. And Phoebe's heritage gave me the answer to the question "what secret?" that I had taken on faith, at the outset, that I would somehow find as I wrote.

I hope you’ll judge for yourself how it all worked out.

–Nancy Werlin

Links (these open in a new window):

Lyrics of "For Good"

Rehearsal of "For Good" (YouTube), from a PBS documentary about Wicked, with Winnie Holzman, Idina Menzel, Kristen Chenoweth, and others. Interviews and music.

"Why There Is No Jewish Narnia“ by Michael Weingrad, Jewish Review of Books, Spring 2010.

Read an Excerpt

 

Read the first two chapters of Extraordinary in the preview. Click in the middle of the gadget to view:

Reviews & Web Extras

Reviews:

• Amazon Best of the Month: "National Book Award finalist Nancy Werlin has crafted an enchanting novel of friendship and loyalties, where family history determines the fate of many and a generations-old pact requires a sacrifice of the greatest proportion. With underlying themes of self-discovery and allegiance, there is more to Extraordinary than first meets the eye."
  .-Seira Wilson, Amazon.com, Sept. 2010
• Top Ten Autumn 2010 Kids' Indie Next List:
  “What on the surface is a highly enjoyable story of suspense involving a covert mission of faery siblings and the mysterious debt that must be paid by a human teen, becomes a subtle yet vital examination of dating violence and esteem issues in adolescent girls. This should be on high school reading lists everywhere. Extraordinary, indeed!”
  —Beth Simpson, Cornerstone Books, Salem, MA
• "Medieval Jewish history, ethical questions, faeries, modern romance. Whew! In the hands of a less talented author, this would be a hot mess. Happily, Werlin crafts her characters so deftly and unrolls the story so cleverly that ... readers will be under the spell till the end."
  -Booklist (July, 2010)
• "A present-day teen's search for self collides with a magical faerie world in this suspenseful fantasy ... Werlin smoothly blends contemporary realism and fantasy, here basing the story on the real historical figure Mayer Rothschild and spinning his family's extraordinary success into a supernatural bargain. ... Phoebe's final reckoning with the faeries tests her own inner strength; ultimately her survival depends on it -- just as in the real world.
  -Horn Book (Sept/Oct, 2010)
• "Beguiling . . . This proudly Jewish fantasy offers a compelling tale of friendship and a refreshing antidote to faerie stories about that one special girl deserving of supernatural love."
  -Kirkus (Sept, 2010)
• "An epic tale of faerie, full of love, lies, betrayal and (most of all) friendship. Werlin’s themes include abusive relationships, religious tolerance and the intricacies of female friendship. A heartbreaking story of the difference between being ordinary and extraordinary."
  -Romantic Times (four stars, Sept. 2010)
• "[As] an avid mystery and fantasy reader, I can't recall a single book with a Jewish main character that wasn't about being Jewish, rather than about finding magic or solving crimes.... It starts out as a compulsively readable tale of friendship and loyalty, then gradually turns into a mesmerizing psychological thriller. Most of all, it is an insightful and powerful depiction of one girl's struggle -- a struggle defined by her situation, but universal in scope -- to figure out what it means to be extraordinary."
  -Leah Cypess, The Jewish Advocate (Sept. 3, 2010)
• "Werlin raises interesting questions about honesty, love, and what it truly means to be ‘extraordinary.’ ”
  -Publishers Weekly (Aug, 2010)

Web Extras:

• Visit the official Penguin book website.
• Creating the Book Cover - Publishers Weekly ShelfTalker blog.
• The Hunger Games, Love, Casablanca, and the Madding Crowd (and a little bit about Extraordinary) - guest post on Libba Bray's blog.
• Interview with Nancy Werlin at Kay Em Evans's blog.

Publications Info

• Reading level: Ages 12 and up.
• ISBN: 978-0803733725
• U.S. Hardcover: Dial Books (Penguin Putnam Inc.), September 7, 2010.
• Audiobook: Brilliance Audio, September, 2010.