Editorial Content for A Tale of Highly Unusual Magic

An Exquisite Corpse is a collaborative storytelling game that was popular in Victorian parlors. In it, each participant adds blindly to the story hoping to create a surprising but cohesive tale. In her latest middle grade novel, A TALE OF HIGHLY UNUSUAL MAGIC, Lisa Papademetriou uses a very special Exquisite Corpse to unite two girls, one in Texas and one in Pakistan, and explore themes of family, friendship and the importance of being yourself.

Kai has been sent to spend the summer with her great-aunt Lavinia while her mother looks for a new job. She's happy to be someplace where she is not known as the weird kid and away from the pressure to be a violin prodigy. Lavinia gives her a freedom she has never experienced and right away she becomes friends with a budding lepidopterist named Doodle and finds a strange, almost blank, book called THE EXQUISITE CORPSE. Compelled to write in it, Kai begins a magical correspondence both with the book and with a girl across the world --- Leila.

The story of Ralph and Edwina is as twisty and interesting as the best Exquisite Corpse and it draws both Kai and Leila in, mirroring some of their own emotions and inspiring them to look at the world and understand themselves in new ways.

Leila is spending the summer with her family in Lahore, Pakistan. She is hoping for an adventure, like the one her over-achieving little sister is having in Africa, or like the ones she reads in her favorite books. But instead, she is caught between cultures in the sweltering heat of Lahore and the cute boy she meets only has eyes for her cousin. Leila, too, finds a copy of THE EXQUISITE CORPSE and begins writing in it. Soon, both girls are watching as the story of Ralph Flabbergast unfolds before their eyes.

Ralph Flabbergast grew up loving magic and looking for signs of it everywhere. But it is not until he meets a violin-playing orphan heiress named Edwina Pickle that he comes to understand the power of love as the greatest kind of magic. The story of Ralph and Edwina is as twisty and interesting as the best Exquisite Corpse and it draws both Kai and Leila in, mirroring some of their own emotions and inspiring them to look at the world and understand themselves in new ways.

A TALE OF HIGHLY UNUSUAL MAGIC intertwines these three perspectives --- that of Kai, of Leila and of Ralph --- in fun and poignant ways. The girls, away from the comforts and expectations of home, are each challenged to assert themselves in creative ways. The novel is full of sweet and age appropriate romance and the joy of belonging, but especially a message of empowerment found in individuality. A very sweet and original story of growing up.