Author Kai Cheng Thom on how fantasy saved her life and shaped her new middle-grade novel

Kai Cheng Thom always wanted to be a fantasy author. After years of working as a social worker and publishing three books for adult readers, she's making that dream real with The Shapeshifter's Guide to Gym Class, a middle-grade novel that arrives September 1.

Thom's first book, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir, was a sort-of-true story about her history of sex work that became a runaway hit when published in 2016. It earned her an emerging writer prize from the Writer's Trust of Canada and caught the attention of Emma Watson's book club. In the decade since, she's published three more books, establishing herself as a tender and empathetic voice exploring the monstrosity and beauty of the world.

Her new novel is split into two parts: a chronicle of a young shapeshifter fighting a plague, and a guidebook for young readers on pressing topics like puberty, their bodies, emotions and all manner of transitions. "The thing that saved my life as a burnt out millennial was fantasy literature," Thom says—much of it written by women and queer folks. She cites Tamora Pierce's The Song of the Lioness, about a girl who disguises herself as a boy to become a knight, and Laurence Yep's Dragon of the Lost Sea, about an exiled dragon princess disguised as human, as vital influences. Those books carried gender-bending, discrimination, diaspora and exile—ideas she's now weaving into her own work for a younger generation.

Thom describes The Shapeshifter's Guide as a distillation of all her previous works. "It is all about this obsession I've had with monstrosity—meaning someone who is evil as opposed to someone who is simply different—and the power of monsters to invite change," she says. "It's also about how communities decide to destroy or embrace what makes them uncomfortable."

A line in the prologue—"Remember sweetness"—anchors the book's underlying theme. "The idea of remembering sweetness is about knowing that, in the midst of conflict, we each have the capacity to make things sweeter. When we are kind to one another, magic is possible," Thom says.

Before becoming an author, Thom spent nearly a decade as a social worker, working closely with families with children between ages four and 25. That experience saturates the new book. "When kids are telling you that you're terrible and they hate you—which happens frequently—they're often saying that they think they're terrible and they hate themselves," she says. "Each one contained a whole world of magic and mystery and suffering. And there was so much resilience." She learned that art was a vital part of therapeutic work, and that glimpses of young people's creativity reveal precious worlds in formation.