l to r: Wesley King and Steve Wolfhard

“I knew something was up when I grew a beard in the fifth grade. Overnight.” So begins the new middle-grade reader from prolific Newfoundland-based author Wesley King. Eleven-year-old narrator-protagonist Baxter “Bax” Brooks is a seemingly normal kid who plays a lot of video games, does well at school, says “bro” a lot (like, a lot), and is obsessed with basketball – both playing it and watching it. 

The normal part goes out the window when Bax displays some remarkable (and embarrassing) spontaneous hair growth, particularly when he stares at a bright light. It’s quickly revealed that Bax is a werewolf, and so he is shipped off to Prodigium Academy, a school for monsters, where he encounters tween and teen trolls, vampires, mummies, merpeople, goblins, and more. At his new school he discovers the game of beast ball – basically basketball, except with monsters and significantly more lax rules. Bax makes the school team, the Prodigium Pugs, currently suffering a 93-year losing streak and heading toward a tournament in which the multi-monster Pugs are expected to yet again flop hard against teams from homogenous monster schools (all vampires, all mummies, etc.). Prodigium is the only monster school with a diverse population. Part of the team’s problem, they believe, is this very diversity: how can all these different monsters work together effectively?

You can probably guess how this turns out: Bax helps his team realize there is strength in diversity, while coming to accept and embrace his own werewolf nature. “You equate your true identity with shame,” his dad, who has been conveniently reading a book on child psychology, tells him. “To beat it, you have to face that shame and the accompanying fear.” It’s a little on the nose, but so is almost everything in Beast Ballerz, which is not necessarily a bad thing. This is a story that wants to deliver its core message of self-acceptance and the power of diversity in as breezy a way as possible, so King keeps the narrative relatively friction-free. There are no real villains, aside from the snobs from the other schools, and the various conflicts that do arise tend to get resolved with a single heart-to-heart conversation. There are moments when a dash of darkness or difficulty may have deepened the emotional stakes and made Bax’s victories feel a little less inevitable, but King does a solid job of slipping important ideas into a tale that moves with the speed and skill of a power forward.