I was less than impressed with Impossible, Nancy Werlin’s first foray into modern-day fantasies.  I really can’t tell you why I picked up Extraordinary.  Its plot seemed very similar in tone to Impossible and I worried that I would encounter the same contrived characters and unrealistic dialogue.

I expected to pick up the book, read a couple of chapters, and give up on it immediately.  Surprisingly, that’s not what happened – I started reading and before I knew it, I was halfway through the book and very resistant to setting it down until I had finished.

Phoebe Rothschild is the daughter of a very rich and successful woman.  She knows that her parents expect extraordinary things from her, and it can be daunting at times.  Luckily for her, she has a best friend in Mallory Tolliver, and the two girls help each other battle the trials of adolescence.  What Phoebe doesn’t know is that Mallory is a fairy, sent by the fairy queen to collect an age-old debt from Phoebe – and the friendship between the girls is a ruse to carry out the fairies’ plan.

Things are actually going OK for Phoebe until the fairy queen decides Mallory isn’t moving quickly enough and sends Mallory’s fairy brother, Ryland, to finish the job.  While Mallory’s character is ambiguous in terms of good or evil, Ryland is definitely a villain.  He glamors Phoebe into thinking she has fallen in love with him and commits several acts of psychological torture upon her, attempting to wreck her self esteem and crush her perception of herself.  There’s a purpose behind Ryland’s cruelty, but we don’t find that out until near the end.  Whether Mallory allows Ryland to destroy her friend whom she has grown to love, and whether Phoebe herself can find a way to fight back, is the crux of the story.

Despite my initial misgivings about the book, there were a couple of things that convinced me to give it a shot.  First, the cover is beautiful.  Second and more importantly, I appreciated that Werlin turned the abusive hunk as love interest trend on its head and showed Ryland for the creep he is – it’s not ambiguous, and he’s never painted as a misunderstood rebel.  Phoebe is glamored by him, and Werlin does a fantastic job portraying Phoebe’s inability to resist but also creating a sense of revulsion with the reader.

The writing in Impossible bothered me so much that I’m almost bewildered by the high quality of writing I feel makes up Extraordinary.  All of the dialogue was believable, particularly between Mallory and Phoebe, and I never paused at a moment in the book to wrinkle my nose and say to myself “That doesn’t sound right.”  Extraordinary is largely a fantasy, but it’s grounded in the real world and the relationships that make up the real world: the relationship between Phoebe and Mallory, the relationship between Phoebe and her parents, and the twisted relationship between Phoebe and Ryland.  It’s all excellently written and captivating to read.

Extraordinary is a book about what separates ordinary people from extraordinary ones (if anything), and to a lesser extent it’s about the meaning of friendship.  It’s the mark of a talented writer that the majority of the book centers around these topics but doesn’t become mired in pontification upon either point.  There’s little real action, but you’d never know by how quickly I read the book.

Some excellent characterization, particularly in the relationship between Mallory and Phoebe, also marks this as a much better effort than Impossible.  The entrance of Ryland and the escalation of the fairies’ mission in the human world necessitates the slow disintegration of Mallory and Phoebe’s friendship.  The fight that eventually breaks the two apart isn’t out of place between a normal human girl and her normal human friend.  It’s heartbreaking to read, but that’s how I know it’s good. 

The motivation behind the fairies’ involvement in Phoebe’s life concerns what it means to be an extraordinary person, in particular how one regards oneself.  Phoebe struggles with feeling overshadowed by her brilliant mother, her talented father, and her beautiful friend, and it is her perception of herself as extraordinary or ordinary that ultimately determines her fate.  This “magical forces at work to cripple a teenager’s self-worth” is an excellent metaphor for the worries of adolescence.  As a teenager, I struggled daily with my own self-esteem and perception of myself, trying to determine if I was special or merely ordinary.  Fairies as the manifestation of the force that tries to break a teenager’s self-worth is therefore pretty relatable and a great way to demonstrate the concept.

Extraordinary is a fantasy, but I’m not sure it would appeal to fantasy lovers who tend to avoid contemporary realistic fiction.  I’m also not sure it would appeal to lovers of realistic fiction who avoid fantasy at all costs.  For the reader who appreciates both genres or is willing to give anything new a shot, Extraordinary should hit home.  Obviously, I was pretty impressed with this one.  Nancy Werlin hasn’t convinced me that Impossible was an anomaly, but I’ll probably pick up her next book and give it a try.