Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A teenager fights to keep a series of baroque fantasy worlds from tearing his reality apart.Something terrible happened to Kane Montgomery at the old mill in his Connecticut hometownor he did something terrible there; but with his memory of the night gone, even he couldn't tell you what. Now Kane has to prove that he's stable enough to go back to school, a task made infinitely more difficult by visions of spiderlike monsters and mysterious encounters with a glamorous, overtly queer person named Dr. Poesy. When Kane and his friendsbullied Ursula Abernathy, queen bee Adeline Bishop, golden boy Elliot Levi, and gorgeous, moody Dean Floresare pulled into a series of immersive fantasy worlds generated by the minds of their town's residents, Kane must figure out whom to trust and whom to save before fantasy destroys reality completely. The narrative and aesthetics are joyously, riotously queer, reveling in moments of sensuality between Kane and other boys as well as in Dr. Poesy's drag-queen ensembles and the over-the-top fantasy worlds. Adeline and Dean are brown-skinned, Elliot is Jewish, and LGBTQ secondary and background characters suffuse the story. While the plot is predictable, the story's many pop-culture influences feel derivative, and the prose often rings hollow and thesaurus-happy, the themes of creating one's own reality and fighting against the rules imposed by the world you're born into will ring powerfully true for many young readers.A colorful, queer fantasy pastiche. (Contemporary fantasy. 14-18) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.