Ben­ji Zeb has to bal­ance prepar­ing for his bar mitz­vah, his feel­ings for a school bul­ly, and being a were­wolf in this heart­felt, com­ing-of-age nov­el for mid­dle-grade read­ers. For fans of Don’t Want to Be Your Mon­ster and Too Bright to See.

Ben­ji Zeb has a lot going on. He has a lot of study­ing to do, not only for school but also for his upcom­ing bar mitz­vah. He’s ner­vous about Mr. Ruther­ford, the aggres­sive local ranch­er who hates Ben­ji’s fam­i­ly’s kib­butz and wolf sanc­tu­ary. And he has­n’t fig­ured out what to do about Caleb, Mr. Ruther­ford’s step­son, who has been bul­ly­ing Ben­ji pret­ty hard at school, despite Ben­ji want­i­ng to be friends (and maybe some­thing more). And all of this is made more com­pli­cat­ed by the fact that, secret­ly, Ben­ji and his entire fam­i­ly are were­wolves who are using the wolf sanc­tu­ary as cov­er for their true iden­ti­ties!

Things come to a head when Caleb shows up at the kib­butz one night … in wolf form! He’s a were­wolf too, unable to con­trol his shift­ing, and he needs Ben­ji’s help. Can anx­ious Ben­ji jug­gle all of these things along with his grow­ing feel­ings toward Caleb?