A Izenson lives in a world where transgender youth are an unwelcome anomaly. Although assigned female at birth, fourteen-year-old A is nonbinary. Because his parents think he is gender confused, they force him to attend Save our Sons and Daughters (SOSAD) meetings, where a type of conversion therapy takes place through counseling for “temporary emotional issues.” A’s parents not only want their daughter back, they want to see legislation passed to prevent estrogen or testosterone treatments that might support youth who wish to transition during puberty and to put an end to “this transgender craze.”
At SOSAD, he meets Yarrow, an agender teen who doesn’t like pronouns. Yarrow is “always positive, always believing things could get better, always giving people a chance. Always honest no matter what. Even when that honesty has consequences” (12). When the leader of the group decides Yarrow is a difficult case, Yarrow gets sent away for “advanced treatment.” Convinced that he has to rescue Yarrow, A sets out on a mission with another SOSAD youth Sal, a lesbian “who hates everything.”
Feeling like a figment of his parents’ imagination, A seeks freedom to make his own choices, rather than to be “trapped in a life and a body he can’t see himself living in much longer” (15). He desires to “have a job and make friends and to go to parties. COVID had taken away part of [his] life; transphobia had taken away even more” (232), and he wants to live his life on his own terms.
While on his quest to find Yarrow, A is visited by a golem, a Jewish protection spirit. This golem tells A that he has been chosen to unravel the “thread of cruelty [that] weaves through the warp and weft of your kind. . . a primordial consciousness that knows only malice and hate” (35). Because A is in the process of becoming, he has been imbued with holiness, according to the golem.
Such is the beginning of A World Worth Saving by Kyle Lukoff. Set in Seattle, the novel explores issues surrounding gender identity, while also revealing a great deal of cultural detail about the Jewish faith.
As A solves the mystery of Yarrow’s whereabouts, he discovers a seedy underbelly of social control led by people like Joanna and Dr. Lagnis who claim to value children and who wish to end their suffering but try to repurpose the “damaged [youth] into something we can use” (69). With this discovery, A wonders whether a world that won’t accept him and other nonbinary youth is a world worth saving.
With a blessing from the golem, A is able to see “all the creepy stuff” that others cannot. Perceiving beyond what he knows, these new “magically scientific eyes” enable him to see evil intent, to see sheyds/sheydim so that he can work for justice. As Rabbi Singer tells him, “It is not upon us to complete the work, neither are we free to desist from it. This is a holy thing to accept” (141).
In addition to the layer of mystery surrounding the novel, readers will likely appreciate Lukoff’s philosophy. Ideas like taking the time to reflect and repent being itself a kind of power or how words themselves are imbued with a certain supremacy remind us of the value of clear expression in communication. Furthermore, Lukoff prompts us to recall the value in working collaboratively, as it takes the combined efforts of the Transshack members to move forward.
- Donna