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ABOUT THE BOOK
NO SPOILERSAlmost twelve years old, Emma Pearl Casey lives with her older brother Topher and her grandmother, Granny Blue, at the Boneyard Cafe, a bakery built inside an old church that borders the ancient Blackbird Hollow Cemetery in the Tennessee mountains. Emma gives free cemetery tours, misses her mother, Jasmine, who died two years earlier, and waits for her own Destiny Dream, a family tradition passed down through generations of women called the Wildflowers and recorded in an old book called the Book of Days. Each ancestor dreams of a field of blue flowers holding a clue to her extraordinary destiny. When money troubles push Granny Blue toward selling the cafe and graveyard to a developer named Warren Steele, Emma's Destiny Dream finally arrives, but it makes no sense: just an old key resting on a bundle of flowers. Determined to save her home and feel connected to the mother she lost, Emma sets off with her best friend, Cody Belle, and a new, silent friend named Earl Chance to chase down a local legend about a ghost called the Conductor and a treasure hidden somewhere in the hills of Blackbird Hollow.
Free Battle of the Books questions for The Key to Extraordinary
SPOILERSEvery one of these has the same answer, and that is the point. In a real battle the question is read aloud with a dozen other books in play, and students have a few seconds to place it. Here is what a battle might ask about The Key to Extraordinary. Use them as a quiz, a trivia round, or BOTB practice.
Where in the book they come from
- Early in the book
In what book does a girl hand out heart-shaped sunglasses at the start of a cemetery tour?
✓ Answer
The Key to Extraordinary by Natalie Lloyd
Emma gives free graveyard tours, and the Sunday morning one is the famous Love Tour. The heart shaped shades are part of the full tour experience she likes to give her guests, most of whom are white haired regulars who have heard her speech a hundred times.
- First half
In what book does a girl tell a silent boy that she is allergic to furniture polish?
✓ Answer
The Key to Extraordinary by Natalie Lloyd
Emma is terrible at small talk, so she digs through her brain for any interesting fact about herself and blurts out this one. It finally cracks Earl, who ducks his head and almost smiles for the first time.
- First half
In what book do tiny violets bloom one by one to form a path to a grave?
✓ Answer
The Key to Extraordinary by Natalie Lloyd
Emma and Cody Belle both feel the Touch on the back of their necks, and then the flowers open up in a line straight to a tall ivy covered stone. Flowers in Blackbird Hollow have a habit of blooming in paths whenever Emma is meant to follow one.
- Second half
In what book does a pale blue star-shaped flower glow as if dipped in glitter?
✓ Answer
The Key to Extraordinary by Natalie Lloyd
Greta describes the Starbloom as an almost extinct healing flower that shines under a full moon. Emma blurts out that she has seen one, because the Healing Blues were growing on Lily Kate Abernathy's grave.
- Second half
In what book does a grandmother dance alone in an empty cafe with an invisible partner?
✓ Answer
The Key to Extraordinary by Natalie Lloyd
Emma catches a spin of movement through the window and thinks the kitchen ghost is back. It is really Granny Blue with the jukebox turned up loud, cutting loose even with Warren Steele's deadline pressing down on them.
- Near the end
In what book does a girl dive onto an old trunk in a pitch-dark cave?
✓ Answer
The Key to Extraordinary by Natalie Lloyd
Emma follows dusty footprints out of the cafe cellar and into the caves beneath Blackbird Hollow. When a second flashlight beam lands on the trunk, she runs and jumps on it supergirl style, yelling that it is hers.
