'A World Worth Saving' young adult novel uses the supernatural to tackle 'transphobic backlash'

Within hours of taking office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order saying the country’s official policy is that there are two genders: male and female.

State legislatures across the country continue to debate bills dealing with who can use which bathrooms and play on which school sports teams.

It is into this environment that a new novel for young adults hits the shelves. "A World Worth Saving" tells the story of a transgender teenager and his struggles with his parents. But it also has a supernatural element to it: a golem — a character in Jewish folklore — that protects trans kids.

Kyle Lukoff, author of the book, says his life is full of great people trying to give him ideas for books and him not wanting to write those books. Except in this case. Lukoff joined The Show to discuss what sounded so good to him about this idea.

Full conversation

KYLE LUKOFF: Well, I had been thinking about writing something fantasy adventure style, sort of like the Percy Jackson books just because I love those books so much and I know how popular they are with kids. And I was just sort of mulling this idea over casually, but I didn't know really what I wanted to, what I wanted to be about.

And when I realized that that could sort of be the hook, it all slowly started to come together for me. But this book took a much longer time than any of my other novels for me to figure out what it was really about. I'd say it took probably about two years before I finally got the big ideas in place behind it.

BRODIE: Why do you think that was the case?

LUKOFF: I think because for one, this book is dealing with a lot more than my other novels. My other novels have been wonderful, and they've also been relatively straightforward stories where there's kind of one big idea that I'm curious about or looking at. And in this one, there were several different ideas that I was trying to put together all at once.

And then also just the scope of what I was dealing with was so much larger. So I'm dealing with, you know, I'm writing about a trans kid from an unsupportive family. I'm trying to talk about the current anti-trans panic that we're in right now, but I also wanted it to be a very Jewish story dealing with history and mythology and folklore and theory. And I didn't know how all of those ideas were going to fit together, and it, it just feels like magic. Like at some point I just realized what was going on and how they thought we're gonna blend together, and it just came to me.

BRODIE: So not being a writer of books myself, I can imagine that it would be sort of an easy trap to fall into, once you have decided to go sort of down the supernatural route, that it could get kind of cheesy maybe and could sort of take over some of the other messages and ideas that you're trying to get to. I'm curious if that's something that was going through your mind as you were writing this, that “yes, I want to have a supernatural component here, but there's also some very serious issues and and serious ideas I'm trying to get out, and I don't want those to be overtaken by, you know, by this mythical creature.”

LUKOFF: Very much so, yeah, there were, I'd say that there are two large things that I was trying to avoid in this. One was that I didn't want it to be the classic chosen one narrative. I don't like the idea that like one person is the most magic and special boy, and the only one who can fix things when we know that all human beings have the capacity for incredible things, and that also, it is never just one person. It is always community and it's always solidarity, and it's always who you choose to align yourself with. So I wanted to write a book about one person where he also wasn't just the magic special one.

And also, I didn't want to write the kind of realistic fantasy that relied on cheap magic. I wanted all of the supernatural elements to feel, if not realistic, then at least plausible within the context of Jewish teaching and Jewish learning. And I didn't know very much about that when I started writing this book. It took tons of research and tons of thinking about what I read and what I learned and how that could connect to the story itself. I didn't want to just hand wave it away, and so like there was magic, he said a magic spell, and that I think is how I avoided making it cheesy. I tried to avoid the two major tropes of like the one chosen one, and then a hand waving approach to how it's all fitting together.

BRODIE: Well, on that second point, I would imagine that it kind of becomes an issue of credibility with your readers, right? Because as you say, the main character is a trans child with unsupportive parents, and there are other trans kids who also have unsupportive parents, and I would think that if you just use some supernatural, you know, feature to make the parents suddenly understand who their kids are, the readers would be like, that, that's not really how life works.

LUKOFF: Yeah, that's true. I also didn't want to make it seem like every type of like hatred or bigotry is driven by supernatural forces. There's definitely some of that, but I also think that that lets human beings off the hook.

BRODIE: Hm, interesting. So you mentioned sort of the moment that we are in and what it means for people in the trans community. How much did that play into, not just your desire to write this book, but how you wrote it and maybe how the characters evolved throughout it?

LUKOFF: I think that's part of what made this book so hard for me to write. I, I've said before, with my first two novels, “Too Bright to See,” and then my second novel, “Different Kinds of Fruit,” they very much deal with trans characters and trans themes, but they don't really talk about transphobia. And that is because I'm not very interested in transphobia. I don't think that there's anything that it has to teach me. There's nothing there that I'm curious about. There's nothing in there that I want to engage with intellectually. It's all just reheated talking points and moral panics that have been pretty much unchanged for, for decades upon decades.

However, if I was going to write this book about a golem protecting a trans kid, he needed to be protected from something. And there's a limited number of things in this world that I, well, no, that's not true. There's an unlimited number of things that people need to be protected from. However, in the story as it came to me, I knew that I could not avoid this current iteration of anti-trans sentiment and transphobic backlash. And it was hard for me because again, there's nothing there that I find interesting. So I had to find a way to write about that subject in a way that felt compelling to me, which I think is part of why I wanted to weave in elements of Jewish teaching as it as it relates to periods of transition or liminal moments or liminal spaces, because that I find it much more interesting than whatever people have to say about us at any given moment.

BRODIE: I know for a lot of children's authors, it's really important that readers are seen in the in the pages of the book, that either they feel represented or if the book is not about somebody like them, that they can learn about somebody maybe who is different from them and understand what their life is like and what they deal with and what they go through and that kind of thing. How much of that played into what you wrote in this story?

LUKOFF: You know, this is my 16th or 17th book, and it is my first book that includes a Jewish character. And what's interesting is that I've been Jewish since the day that I was born. But I only came out as trans when I was in my 20s, but all of my books are about trans people. And I think, you know, a friend of mine told me that they see more of me in this book than they have seen in any of my other books. And I think that is because the experience of growing up as a Jewish kid in a part of the world that had a tiny, tiny, tiny Jewish community. I think there were like two other Jewish kids in my high school of 2,000 that had more of an effect on how I see myself and how I see the world than really anything else has.

BRODIE: All right, that is Kyle Lukoff, children's author, whose new book is called “A World Worth Saving.” Kyle, really nice to talk to you. Thank you.

LUKOFF: You, too. Thanks so much, Mark.