The Isle (27 page)

T
here's a saying, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Well, similarly, it took nearly the entire island of Manhattan (and some very special New Jerseyites) to help bring
The Ward
and
The Isle
into the world. Thank you, Lauren Frankel, my brilliant cousin, who set the ball in motion. She showed me her copy of
The Hunger Games
, and YA had me hooked.

To Claudia Gabel: Life changed in the most wonderful ways because of you. I'm forever grateful that I got to be in your MediaBistro class, and that you wanted to take a chance on me (and Ren!). You're made of nothing but pure, Grade A fairy dust.

Thank you, Ben Rosenthal, for your editorial eye, and for your patience as I caught up.
The Isle
would be a cartoon without you.

Thank you to my agent, Ginger Clark. You continue to be my cloak of invisibility and my Excalibur all in one.

Carol Fitzgerald and Tom Donadio and everyone else at the Book Report Network, you taught me about the book world. This process would have been far scarier were it not for TBRN. Thank you! Rebecca and Jeremy Wallace-Segall, thank you for sharing Writopia with me—I am immeasurably better for it, in ways I'm continuing to understand. Linn
Prentis, for showing me the SF/sci-fi ropes. I learned so much during our time working together! Thank you, Jaimee Garbacik, Elyse Tanzillo, and Frank Weimann, for taking a chance on a poetry grad. Jaimee, for your creative editorial support early on. And Elyse . . . Oh, Elyse. What would these books be you? You are my human deus ex machina, a miraculous fix from above swooping in at the last minute.

Thank you Ryan Elwood, Seastar, for living in the water with me. I love you, Adam Courtney, for my stellar website photos and for your esoteric knowledge on the habits of villains. You know far too much to be one of the good guys. Kurt Ritta, for your cabin in the woods; Amy Dupcek, for our “writing” dates—I REGRET NOTHING; Aurora Wells . . . for you; Lindsay Turner, for being my rainbow; Jenny Williamson, for being a brain I adore storming around with.

Justin Barad, you are my very own Dr. Justin Corey/Callum Pace. You deserve a medal and a real PhD for all the hours you spent on the phone with me, researching. Frederic Pryor, Senior Research Scholar of Economics at Swarthmore College, for discussing the economics of a water stress situation with me; Germán Mora, Department Chair of Environmental Studies at Goucher College, for a crash course in climate change; and Pat Rivera, of the Museum of Indian Culture in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for providing me with information about how the Lenni Lenape people lived in this area during the time of Dutch settlement.

Any errors in this book are my own.

To the inspiring English and creative writing instructors in my life: Micol Ostow, Beth Spires, Michelle Tokarczyk,
Arnold Sanders, Jeff Myers, Johnny Turtle, Lee Foust, T.J. Anderson, Rick Tretheway, Thorpe Moeckel, and Jeanne Larsen. Thank you.

An epic thank you to everyone at Katherine Tegen Books—my publisher, Katherine Tegen, my first editor Claudia Gabel, and Ben Rosenthal. Also Laurel Symonds, Melissa Miller, and Alexandra Arnold, and the entire art team for their work on the cover. And thank you to everyone at Curtis Brown—my agent Ginger Clark and also Holly Frederick and Kerry D'Agostino—for helping get
The Ward
out there.

Lastly, my fam—my sister, my cousins, my aunts and uncles. Your support knows no bounds. Grandma, I'm too lucky to have you in my life. Thank you for knowing me better than I knew myself, and for the gentle nudge in the right direction. Mom and Dad, I'm so very, very blessed to have you both on my team. Your faith in me is the only reason I took my own writing seriously.

Thank you.

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JORDANA FRANKEL
teaches a YA novel writing class at her alma mater, Goucher College, as the Kratz Writer-in-Residence, and has also taught creative writing classes at Writopia Lab. She is a former marketing associate at the Book Report Network and received her MFA in creative writing from Hollins University. She lives in New York City. Jordana is also the author of
The Ward
. You can visit her online at
www.jordanafrankel.com
.

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The Ward

The Isle

Cover art © 2016 by

ALISDAIR MILLER

Images of girls © 2016 by

MAGGIE MCCALL / TREVILLION IMAGES

ELISABETH ANSLEY / TREVILLION IMAGES

Cover design by

ERIN FITZSIMMONS

Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

THE ISLE
. Copyright © 2016 by Jordana Frankel. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

www.epicreads.com

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015939178

ISBN 978-0-06-209537-4

EPub Edition © December 2015 ISBN 9780062095398

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FIRST EDITION