BEAST BALLERZ

Mortifying eruptions of thick brown hair on his face (and elsewhere) get 11-year-old Baxter Brooks shipped off to a boarding school for monsters.

Ostracized at school due to episodes of mysterious hirsuteness—and even fangs—Bax lands at Prodigium Academy, which is part of a network of secret monster schools. Better yet, he’s offered a spot on the school’s “beast ball” squad, which hasn’t won a game in 93 years and has a motley assortment of players including a garden gnome and a mermaid. They’re rejects from rival schools, each of which admits only prime specimens of one kind of monster (“Monsters are mad judgy, bro,” admits a troll). They’ve been sneeringly dubbed losers so often that they’ve come to believe it. Besides getting over his own reluctance to admit that he’s a werewolf, Bax works on his teammates’ self-esteem and develops a playbook that leverages their particular strengths, all before an upcoming tournament. Punctuated by pep talks, the ensuing events feature plenty of exciting b-ball action on the way to a literally soaring finish. Despite a tendency to trumpet his themes—the main one being that physical differences should be celebrated, not despised—King concocts an entertaining tale wrapped around a diverse cast of misfits and a wildly anarchistic version of basketball. Wolfhard’s loose line drawings capture the narrative’s lighthearted tone nicely. Prodigium’s residents are diverse in skin color.

Message-heavy, but a slam-dunk romp.