Amid magic and monsters, a queer seventh-grader discovers a world where he can be himself but has to decide if he will fight for it…even if it means becoming the villain.

Clementine has always felt like the villain of his story. Most of the time, he’s a socially anxious kid who knows it’s not “normal” for a boy to wear pink shoes to school. While he’s there, his teachers won’t call him by the right name (even though Clementine is a boy’s name, if a boy has it), his classmates tease him about his obsessive love for spiders (even though they’re beautiful), and he’s the only one who can see the floating faces that haunt the surrounding woods.

But in the woods, everything is different. At night, he and his new friends Beetle, Cricket, and Anise spend hours in a play-pretend world that seems to be seeping into reality. Clementine has never had a friend like Beetle—a boy who breaks into his house and teaches him to howl at the moon, who dreams of being a hero and says the whole sky is beautiful while looking right at Clementine and not at the sky at all.

But Clementine wants to use the power fueling their adventures to make things better outside the forest—not later, when he’s grown up, but now. And when he discovers the source of the magic, Clementine has to decide: Does he become a hero with Beetle and protect a world that hates him? Or does he finally become the villain, ready to build a new world whatever the cost? In this joyful and uninhibited celebration of imagination, empathy and all things monstrous, debut author Noah Corey tells the story of a queer kid who is exactly and exquisitely himself. This book is a love letter to villains and heroes, and all the ways they make us brave.