This groundbreaking, action-packed, and ultimately uplifting adventure intertwines elements of Jewish mythology with an unflinching examination of the impacts of transphobia. In A World Worth Saving, we follow the journey of A, a trans adolescent grappling with the aftermath of coming out in a world that feels increasingly smaller and hostile. The COVID lockdown may be over, but A’s struggles are far from it. Missing his bar mitzvah and enduring the invasive scrutiny of his parents are just the beginning. The weekly Save Our Sons and Daughters (SOSAD) meetings, where parents lament over a so-called “transgender craze,” only add to his misery.

When A’s friend Yarrow vanishes after a particularly confrontational meeting, A discovers that SOSAD is more sinister than it appears. It’s run by a demon who feeds off the pain and misery of kids like him. As A uncovers the demonic forces at play, he faces the monumental task of saving his friend and confronting a world filled with demons thriving on bigotry and suffering. 

Kyle Lukoff has crafted a fantasy novel with stunning world-building that rival some of the most popular of the genre for this age group. As Rick Riordan, author of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, aptly puts it, “Kyle Lukoff has given us something rare and beautiful—a novel that combines wondrous fantasy, searing real-world relevance, and a frank, empathetic understanding of the adolescent experience that hits so viscerally I can only compare it to the way my generation experienced Judy Blume. The way Lukoff combines these elements in a page-turning adventure is nothing short of magic!”

A World Worth Saving is not just a story of adventure and fantasy; it’s a powerful narrative about identity, resilience, and the fight against bigotry. It is a must-read for anyone seeking a story that is both heart- wrenching and hopeful. Now get ready for a remarkable journey unlike any you’ve ever been on before. 

ELLEN CORMIER (EC): A World Worth Saving is your third middle grade novel, but it’s your first fantasy. What appealed to you about the genre? And how was the process of writing this book different from Too Bright to See and Different Kinds of Fruit?

KYLE LUKOFF (KL): I have a deep love for young people’s fantasy. Two of my favorite series as a kid were the Lioness quartet (Tamora Pierce’s Alanna books) and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. I never thought I would write a fantasy-type book, because they always seemed so hard, but then, I never thought I would write a book in the first place because, again, they seemed so hard. The biggest difference in writing this book was just how much I had to make up. Yes, Too Bright to See and Different Kinds of Fruit are fiction, but so much of them are based on real life, in the world we all live in. I’ve been in creepy houses that felt haunted, I’ve gotten into a fight with a friend that I had a secret crush on, I’ve come out to myself and had people come out to me. But in A World Worth Saving, so much of it had to come from my imagination, while appearing, to the reader, as established and concrete as a day at school. I think I pulled it off, but by the skin of my teeth. 

EC: Once, in the early phases of drafting this book, you told me that you worried you didn’t have enough Jewish education to write it. What did you mean by that? How has writing a book so steeped in the mythology and ethos of Judaism impacted your relationship to your faith? (Or vice versa?)

KL: On the one hand I know that the Jewish intellectual tradition is so vast, ancient, and dense that the most knowledgeable people I know say they feel like they’re playing on the shores of the ocean. On the other hand, I still worry that stories like these should be left in the hands of far more capable people.
 
I was raised Reform, by non-religious parents, with a not uncommon family story. My Eastern European great-grandparents immigrated to Chicago prior to World War II and spoke Yiddish at home. My grandparents, in turn, spoke Yiddish as a “secret language” so their kids, my parents, wouldn’t understand them. So my parents have only a bisl (a little) Yiddish, and I, a fully assimilated American, am now exploring and romanticizing a leftist, anti-Zionist Yiddishkeit history that I in fact know very little of. I also grew up completely separated from a larger Jewish community, in a suburb north of Seattle, and only in my last four years or so of living in NYC did I really start to explore what it meant to reclaim a Jewish identity that felt like it was always mine, yet held just beyond my grasp. 

When I first conceived of this book, I thought it was going to be somewhat incidentally Jewish. The main character, A, would share my sense of alienation from Jewish communities, and there would be a golem, but beyond that I didn’t think our history or folklore would impact the story much thematically. But as I got deeper into the writing of it, the story demanded to become more deeply Jewish, and it in turn required that of me. 
 

EC: In a recent piece for Publishers Weekly you said that your literary Pride wish was “for more books that focus on what queer communities talk about and struggle with amongst each other.” Can you share a bit about some of the intracommunity conversations that take place in this book?
 
KL: I don’t want to give away too much, but! This was my first time writing a trans girl character, and Sal is modeled after so many of the trans women in my life. Loving but very prickly, she is the first character whose arc I had to dramatically rewrite because A thought he needed a sidekick, and the girl that I was writing refused to tag along behind some boy.

There is also the phenomenon of “the narcissism of small differences,” which is endemic in trans communities, and comes up at a few heavy moments here and there in the novel. That is something I could write a whole different book about (and just might, if people want a sequel…) 

EC: Which scene was the most fun to write? Which was the hardest?

KL: The absolute most fun to write was the dumpster diving scene. Now there is something that required zero imagination. Another thing I could write a whole book on is how to eat well on what fancy Brooklyn grocery stores throw away. 

The hardest scene to write was, definitely, the climax of the whole adventure. You know how, when you’re reading an action-packed fantasy, at the end of it the characters get into these big, cinematic scrapes? And you’re reading it like, “Oh my gosh how do they get out of it?? If I was in a scrape like that I would just roll over and die.” So, I got A into the biggest scrape of all, and realized too late that I had no idea how to get him out of it. I did figure it out, eventually, but the solution came from something I had planted way, way back at the beginning of the book, with no conscious intention for what it would grow into. 

EC: One of the things I admire most about your writing is the way you so clearly respect and trust your readers. You challenge them to form their own opinions and draw their own conclusions, rather than telling them how they should respond to the events in your novels. Kids are sometimes (a lot of the time!) more comfortable with this than adults. So what would you say to the adult booksellers about to read this book?

KL: Hi adult bookseller! I have a sneaking suspicion that my illustrious editor here, Ellen, is remembering a note she once left me in this manuscript, asking what emotional response I wanted readers to have in a particular scene. I truculently wrote back that this scene depicted “a lifesaving, beautiful toxic stew of bullshit, and readers are welcome to wrestle over how it makes them feel.” Sorry, Ellen. 

But one of the things I love about books is how they take the chaos and complexity of real life and distill it into a narrative. A compelling beginning, an interesting middle, and a satisfying end. But for that book to feel real, and not just a moral with a plot slumped on top of it, there needs to be enough of the true, confounding, unanswerable questions of being a person sharing a world with other people to breathe life into it. I hope you read this book for what it is, a fictional reflection of reality, with the neat-ish ending required of fiction and the confusion and complexity required of life. I also hope you like it, but as a former bookseller and librarian who had to read a LOT of books for his job, it’s okay if you don’t.