*Welcome to the Town of Remarkable Where Every Day in this Remarkable Place filled with Remarkable People is Positively Remarkable for Absolutely Everyone Except Jane
I don’t think I’d like to live in a town like Remarkable, where everyone is expertly talented in something, everyone is positively happy, and every sentence uttered ends in an exclamation point! I think 10 year old Jane Doe, unnoticed, untalented, and completely unremarkable, would be only person worth knowing. For Jane, the middle child in a remarkable family – her mother is a world renowned architect, her father a prize winning novelist, her gorgeous brother an ultra talented painter and her younger sister a mathematical genius – life is one boring day after another. She’s hardly noticed by her family, the only student in the town’s average public school (since all the other children in town go to the talented & gifted Academy, and virtually ignored by everyone in town.
But then, strange things start to happen and Jane seems to be at the center of it all: a sweet-toothed, polite pirate appears in town; the trouble-making Grimlet twins take Jane on as a de facto apprentice to their schemes; her mild mannered teacher morphs in to a rogue pirate captain; the town’s long-kept is about to be exposed; and there’s a plot to destroy the town’s new, remarkable bell tower. It is seemingly up to mild-mannered Jane to come to the rescue and prove that the ordinary can be exceptional too.
Told in a whimsical, lighthearted voice, Lizzie K. Foley‘s Remarkable is an uplifting, slightly goofy story about a girl who learns that life is wonderfully rich when you’re not trapped into believing “that you’re only as worthwhile as your best attribute.” When Jane learns to trust her instincts, even if she thinks they’re not good enough, she finds that she’s got the smarts, gumption, and common sense to make a lot of sense out of the mysteries around her. In the end, it’s not only Jane who learns that “despite what most people think, the best things in life are often quite ordinary.”
- Posted by Cori