“Why can’t real life be as vivid and glistering and riotous as it is in [Joss] Lake’s novel, in which Bushwick dog-walker Pen Henderson goes on an epic journey to save Blithe, a young trans man that Pen and his friends accidentally hexed via an Instagram post of an aloe plant? The answer to these questions, of course, is that maybe real life can be as magical as the one Lake describes—as long as we work toward dismantling our preconceptions of who we’re supposed to be, rather than who we actually are. If it’s Joss Lake’s world, we’d all be better for living in it—it’d certainly be more colorful, and we’d all have really incredible names.” —Kristin Iversen, Refinery29

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