Review of the Day: Benji Zeb is a Ravenous Werewolf by Deke Moulton

Benji Zeb Is a Ravenous Werewolf
By Deke Moulton
Tundra Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
$17.99
ISBN: 9781774880524
Ages 9-12
On shelves July 2nd

Fun Game to Play: List all the werewolves in children’s literature that you can. The obvious first thought, for better or for worse, goes to Remus Lupin the Harry Potter books, sure. And there are approximately 1.5 billion adult and YA romances that involve werewolves (with a mere 50% of them also incorporating vampires in some way). But in children’s literature the werewolf is an interstitial thing. I read a fair amount of fantasy for 9-12 year olds (cuz I’m just that cool) and I can tell you that while I may have run across the occasional werewolf here and there, they haven’t exactly stuck with me over the years. But having read Benji Zeb is a Ravenous Werewolf by Deke Moulton? It would take some serious head trauma on my part to forget a page of this book. This isn’t just A werewolf book for kids. It is THE werewolf book for kids. Reading it is also like watching Moulton balance about thirty different spinning plates in the air all at the same time. A plate or two may wobble, but the end result isn’t just impressive. It’s inspirational.

It isn’t enough. It isn’t enough that Benji Zeb has a bar mitzvah to study for. It isn’t enough that he feels this overwhelming and crushing anxiety whenever he’s around his family members at the kibbutz/wolf sanctuary they run. It isn’t even enough that he’s a werewolf and now his mom has forbidden him from changing until he’s finished studying. Now Caleb Gao, his one time crush/current bully and stepson of his family’s local enemy, Mr. Rutherford, has shown up at the kibbutz as a werewolf himself. Suddenly, Benji finds himself in the position of teaching Caleb everything he needs to know about shifting, all the while trying to figure out what plans Mr. Rutherford has for his family and their wolves. Turns out, there may be more to Caleb than Benji suspected, and there also may be more that Benji is capable of than anyone, even he himself, ever knew.

There are a fair number of children’s books with Jewish characters in them coming out in the same year as Benji Zeb. There’s fellow fantasy The Lumbering Giants of Windy Pines by Mo Netz and The Color of Sound by Emily Barth Isler. These books discuss their characters’ Jewishness to a certain degree, which is all well and good. What they do not do, though, is just seep the whole book in the religion. To write this story, Moulton essentially had to have a crystal clear sense of how to write instructions and info on Jewish history and ceremonies AND werewolf transformations. So it’s rather clever having Caleb show up on the scene as pretty much a blank slate (albeit with some ingrained prejudices) when it comes to every aspect of Benji’s life. This is a bit dangerous to the author, though. You can feel how much they want to pour exposition onto these pages. Indeed, there will be some readers who may feel like the exposition really does outweigh the storytelling at key moments. I got a sense of that once or twice, but generally felt like Moulton did a good job of balancing out story and explanation. To do that, that blank slate has to stick around and Caleb staying on the scene is tricky. He needs to remain so that he (and by extension, the reader) get more and more explanations. So to have him afraid to go home is smart and, to be frank, a clever way of getting around being trapped in Benji’s head all the time. In ways like this, Moulton anticipates the narrative’s needs.

And that may be where Moulton really excels in this book too. It is, to put it mildly, an ambitious affair. Moulton has big dreams and intentions with this storytelling. They want to show Benji’s anxiety around his own family, dip into a wide variety of topics regarding being Jewish, give some pretty convincing information about werewolves (and essentially convince you that they really are in the Torah), and then on top of all of that have a first-love storyline between two boys AND talk about what happens when someone you love gets sucked into the online world of hate and conspiracies. The one thing the book does not do all that often is talk about wolves’ role as keystone species. I was initially a little surprised that we didn’t hear the word “Yellowstone” come up even once, but then I noticed something about this book: its page count. This book includes all those elements I just talked about while also clocking in at just under 300 pages. After reading bloated fantasies for years, you really gather an appreciation over time for books that know how to tell a good story with efficiency and smarts. This book has both.

Of all the elements it combines, one that struck me as particularly notable was the path that Caleb’s father starts to follow. Indeed, it’s so convincing that if there’s a weak point in the novel, it probably involves his denouement. Moulton, a former US Army drill sergeant, talks in their Author’s Note about seeing loved ones get sucked into that world. “This book is also for all those readers who I grew to know as genuinely good people in the military, who I saw get drawn into terrible hateful mindsets, who have been told by people they trusted to start blaming problems on small, powerless, marginalized populations. Queer communities, Asian communities, and, once again, Jewish communities.” There are plenty of older chapter books for kids out there that engage with hateful people, but rare is the book that talks about the emotional toll that takes place when someone you care for gets sucked into that way of thinking. Like watching a family member being drawn into a cult, it is happening to kids all over our country, but few authors touch on what that feels like. The end result is horrendously timely, and, possibly, a sign of more books of this kind to come. After all, this is an author who knows from whence they write.

But what about the fantasy elements? See, the thing is that this isn’t Moulton’s first rodeo. If you missed their previous book Don’t Want to Be Your Monster, then you may not be aware of how adept they already proved themselves to be when it comes to integrating fantasy elements with some pretty serious real world issues. That book discussed Jewishness in the context of vampires, and the degree to which Bram Stoker’s vampire contained scands of Jewish stereotypes in its narrative. Even so, Monster felt like it was just a warm up for this, the final act. So even while I was admiring how deft Moulton was at, for example, managing to show both how much Benji enjoys spending time with Caleb while also making it clear that Caleb legitimately likes Benji too, it was the logistics of werewolf changing that took my heart. Moulton just seems to have thought everything through. The confusion of having paws when, in your head, you logically believe you should have hands. The feeling of changing, and how much mindfulness has to do with shifting itself. Which elements of werewolves are true and which are prejudices. I think Deke probably cheats a couple times with the whole shifting-while-naked (considering Benji’s and Caleb’s burgeoning feelings, the book is surprisingly bereft of embarrassing moments), but in the long run it really isn’t that much of an issue.

Not a ton of middle grade fantasy novels for kids from secular presses begin with long quotes from Genesis. Still, as badass quotations go, Genesis 49:27 is hard to beat: “Benjamin is a ravenous wolf; In the morning he consumes the foe, And in the evening he divides the spoil.” Now you combine that with the first sentence of the book, and you’ve got something unique: “Despite what you’ve heard about werewolves, my least favorite day of the month isn’t when the moon is full – it’s Rosh Chodesh.” All told, a pretty slambang beginning for a book for kids. An author for children does best when that person embodies a kind of fearlessness about their own material. Deke Moulton doesn’t just embrace their material, though, they celebrate it. Even as they pile on the different elements and attempt to make each one work in its own right, it takes a gutsiness to not only try but get the bulk of it all right AND in a svelte, handsome package. It would be difficult to overstate the impressiveness of Benji Zeb. With that in mind, hand it to your young readers that read fantasy not to escape the real world, but to highlight some of its most difficult elements. Elegant, smart stuff.

On shelves July 2nd.

Source: Galley sent from publisher for review.

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