Walking in Two Worlds by Wab Kinew

  Well-known politicians often write books, usually about their career trajectories, the laws they passed, and / or shooting the beloved family dog. Two years before Wab Kinew was elected as premier of Manitoba, he published Walking in Two Worlds, a young adult fiction novel that I’m considering teaching in grade 9 English.

The big appeal of teaching Walking in Two Worlds is its relatability for a range of teenage experiences. Our main character, Bagonegiizhigok Holiday (Bugz) is an Indigenous girl who is a pro gamer and streamer for a virtual reality game called the Floraverse. I like the gaming aspect of the novel because it also provides the opportunity for some fantasy battles that I think would appeal to young people craving action scenes. Conversely, Bugz’ brother is a dancer at pow wows and impresses the folks on the reservation. With two worlds in the book, it gives a broader range of students the opportunity to connect—though the ‘real world’ sections are more prominent.

There’s another storyline, too. There’s a boy named Feng, a Uyghur sent from China to live on reserve with his aunt. He and Bugz develop a connection, despite Feng being part of an online gaming clan called Clan:LESS that targets Bugz. Indeed, the book starts with Clan:LESS teaming up against Bugz only for her to dominate them. The Clan:LESS group is essentially a group of white supremacist misogynists that want to take out the Indigenous girl and can’t stand that she’s better than them.

I like the idea of the online game being a focus, though it isn’t without some question marks. Number one: it is both a full-immersion virtual reality and a real-world crossover. The details are a little unclear on how it works. When you’re not in the game, it seems to play for you. Also, if you die in the game you have to start over again, and it takes real money to develop your player. It’s a little hazy when Bugz is streaming and hearing and seeing all kinds of comments from her fans where those actually appear if she’s experiencing the game. It’s also a little implausible when Bugz takes out groups of opponents at once and, repeatedly, “hundreds of gamer tags went floating up.” It feels implausible, but we have to just sort of accept it because Bugz has access to a magical resource, a sanctuary that exists in the real world as an Indigenous sacred site, that doubles as a special site in the game.

I think the game is the more engaging of the storylines in the text, though it gets a little less attention as the book goes on. There’s some tension with The Alpha (Clan:LESS’ leader) and Feng, a measly underling trying to earn his place among this misogynist horde. It also seems a little implausible that he’d be friends with Bugz in real life, although maybe I’m just naive to think that young men can resist the temptation of the manosphere.

The book is a little bit on the nose and spells things out for the audience, but I suppose that’s okay for a young adult novel. There’s no ambiguity that Clan:LESS is in the wrong and that Feng needs to abandon the oppressive mindsets to reconcile with his real-world friend. There are a few things that grate on me as being both on-the-nose and stereotypical, but again, maybe that’s just speaking to the adolescent experience. Bugz, for instance, has a number of concerns about her weight; in the real-world, she’s a little overweight, while she made her avatar a hot badass girl with a thin waist. There’s also a sequence in which Bugz considers suicide, indeed goes so far as hanging the noose, and I feel a little uncomfortable with how direct the planning and execution are depicted in the book. The discussion of the Uyghurs and Chinese Islamophobia is also a bit direct, but helps to build a framework for broader issues in the world. The depictions of China and its government might not be entirely “fair and balanced” but maybe it will start a conversation.

The ‘real world’ storyline is a little less gripping to me. There are some interactions with mean girls, her budding romance with Feng, her anxieties about her weight, and so on. More importantly, Bugz’ brother has some health concerns and it’s revealed that he has cancer. The prognosis is not great. The support Bugz and her brother have for one another, though, helps to drive the story forward and leads to some moments of magical realism where they save each others’ lives.

The book touches on a number of key themes I hope to emphasize in the grade 9 English course: identity, community, and voice. It’s the story of a girl who finds herself through and in relation to her community and uses her voice to make a change in online spaces. The book drags a little in places, and the ending is a bit of a flop—we never see the big battle after Bugz’ resurrection—but overall the story is reasonably engaging. I think students would probably like it, but we’ll see how they feel about reading this one soon.

Happy reading!

The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar

  Of the International Booker Prize shortlist for 2026, The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar is my penultimate read, with only the winner remaining. This year’s International Booker Prize seems to have much more of a theme than last, each book reflecting some level of arbitrary rule and tension between the individual and societal expectations. Bazyar explores these ideas through the sometimes confusing historical milieu of Iran, jumping through the narrative in decades across generations: Behzad in 1979, Nahid in 1989, Laleh in 1999, Mo in 2009, and Tara’s un-yeared epilogue.

Like other novels that have multiple narrators, I feel like each section took some acclimatizing. Every new decade was an adjustment period, and it took me probably fifteen pages or so to really get into the flow of the ‘new voice.’ By the end of each section, I felt generally invested; in particular, Behzad’s section involves a plan to transport leaflets and operate through cloak and dagger to contribute to a Marxist revolution. The plan involves a car tradeoff, secret passwords, and mysterious signals like a woman standing in a doorway. That political intrigue was one of the most compelling moments in the first half of the book for me; I also liked Behzad’s quiet, nearly invisible romance with Nahid and the way it developed through a few glances at revolutionary meetings.

Nahid’s section takes on a more domestic flavour—that is, on the surface. Below the surface, there’s a clear concern with the people who’ve been imprisoned, the people who’ve been lost, and the guilt that goes along with leaving them behind. One of my favourite scenes in Nahid’s part is when she and her husband receive a letter that offers a surface reading and a hidden one. The letter “spoke of a lightning strike, a crumbling in the backyard, and rats scuttering through the cracks and getting into her house” (82). It goes on to talk about a rat “hiding stubbornly in her kitchen” enjoying a “nice life of food and familial love” (82). The letters ends in italics: “Walls are crumbling everywhere, and they’ll never stop!” (82). I love the scene of Behzad and Nahid reading the letter together, agreeing, among other things, that the crumbling walls referenced a bomb hitting the prison where their friend was being held, implying that the rat in the house is a harboured former political prisoner. I appreciate the way The Nights are Quiet in Tehran shows how new networks of meaning form in response to censorship, to oppression.

Of all the sections, though, Laleh’s was by far my favourite. The section takes place after years in Germany and Laleh returns with her mother to Iran. Her experience as a teenage girl in Iran, alienated from her friends and relatives, is the most compelling and personal experience in the book. It gives the book a beautiful balance between the historico-political context and the more tangible everyday experiences that define us. Watching Laleh do something as simple as getting her eyebrows done or keeping a secret boyfriend is elevated to an epic status. It’s also around this time that I started reading the book aloud and really noticed the beautiful cadence of the phrases. There’s a beauty that is easy to gloss over if reading too quickly, but following the punctuation gives the sentences a warmly hypnotic quality.

For Mo’s part, the voice is very different. His priorities are very different from his sibling’s and I was pleasantly taken aback by the mention of Russian ska-punk in the opening pages. While Laleh grows into a politically engaged adult (like her parents), Mo is more concerned about his social bonds. He somewhat reluctantly gets involved with the student protests and stays up late watching Youtube videos about Iran when his friend’s girlfriend comes to sleep in his bed. Mo’s concerns are generally less political, and he distances himself from his family’s engagements—at least for the first stages of his journey.

All of the International Booker Prize short list have been good, even great, but Bazyar’s entry falls into the middle of the pack for me through no fault of her own. I think if I were more informed and educated about the history of Tehran and Iran in general, some of the more quiet resonances would land more meaningfully. Keeping track of the different allegiances and the symbolism of small actions would be a little easier.

That being said, I liked The Nights are Quiet in Tehran. While my interest in the sections fluctuates and I need to reset at each new decade, ultimately I found myself connecting with the characters and getting entranced by the pace and rhythms of the writing. There was a lot to like, and, while I have a lot of gaps in my own knowledge, it did make me feel like a more competent and worldly person. I hope that’s true, but it may be too utopian.

Oh, and one more thing: the epilogue offers a glimpse into the future (?). By virtue of the section not having a specific date listed, we might want to believe it’s 2019 to fit the pattern, but the lack of a year suggests that a resolution is both too far off and that it could happen at any moment. The epilogue is about the renewal following the death of an oppressive leader. It’s a moment of liberation, a moment of return for Behzad and Nahid. I hope I live to see that moment.

Happy reading!

The Book of Grief and Hamburgers by Stuart Ross

  Stuart Ross was a mentor to me in my undergrad and, at the time, I charged through several of his poetry collections (shout out to You Exist. Details Follow.). Strangely, I never branched out into any of his ‘novel-esque’ projects and much less his memoirs. Well, that ends today (technically last week when I finished it, but what even is time?)一here we are with The Book of Grief and Hamburgers.

The Book of Grief and Hamburgers exemplifies the masterful happy-sad tone of some of Ross’ best works. The central conceit is that when Ross writes poems that are getting too heavy, he throws in a hamburger. Hamburgers are delightful, they’re a surprise, they’re funny. They displace / replace feelings that are too difficult to deal with. Despite the apparent silliness of Ross’ poems sometimes, there’s also a tenderness and sadness that feels even more powerful precisely because of the apparent silliness. He walks the razor’s edge between whimsy and sorrow wonderfully.

The Book of Grief and Hamburgers in particular operates—somewhat—as a “research” exercise (Ross himself uses that term loosely). Ross scans through poems looking for references to hamburgers as a form of consolation and, often not finding them, instead writes hamburgers into famous poems, historical quotables, and novel lines. It’s a fun, silly surprise. Try it. “It was the best of hamburgers, it was the worst of hamburgers.” “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the hamburger.” “I saw the best hamburgers of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical bunless.” The motif of seeking hamburgers and creating hamburgers is a source of amusement, but again, reinforces the sadness at the core of the book.

Indeed, death permeates the pages of the memoir project. Ross recounts the loss of several of his family, his friends and fellow poets, his dog. There’s such a human approach to addressing the challenges of grief (what is grief, anyway?), including reconciling political tensions with estranged siblings briefly before their passing and doing the ‘death math’ of the proper sequence of death. Ross notes that, in his family, he is the only one that will die in the ‘right order.’ In a particularly moving section, Ross describes the passing of David W. McFadden, another notable poet that I had the privilege to see do a reading. Ross describes McFadden’s Alzheimer's, which is absolutely tragic, but also McFadden reading love haikus at Ross’ wedding, which is absolutely beautiful. After his passing, McFadden’s remains were buried in a Dilbert cookie jar, and the specificity of that image will resonate with me forever.

Many of Ross’ losses are described as vignettes, as short stories. In one, a poet friend rages against the dying of the hamburger—I mean, rages against the euphemisms we use for death. Not pushing daisies, not passing on, not succumbing to illness. He dies. When asked about arrangements for his death, he continually replies: “I don’t care, I’ll be dead.” Does he want his “collected works” to be published posthumously? He doesn’t care: “I’ll be dead.” There’s a bleakness in the repetition spread out throughout the vignette. After his gradual decline, he’s eventually asked again about having works published after his death and provides a slight nod. It’s a beautiful character study that, I hope, brings Ross some consolation.

This book-length essay on grief explores what grief is, how to feel it, what it means to grieve. A conclusive definition continues to elude us, but the exploration takes readers on an emotional journey where Ross demonstrates his deep appreciation and love of those he has lost. It’s quite an achievement in memorialization.

Add to this Ross’ voice. His tone, certainly, and that careful blend of sadness and extra pickles, but his literal voice, too. I listened to The Book of Grief and Hamburgers as an audiobook and it’s a delight to hear Ross’ reading voice. He has a distinct reading style, and it made the book feel all that much more personal to hear that reading voice again, probably for the first time since around 2012.

I really liked this longform essay. Even in its brevity, it captures the feeling, hard to describe, of mourning. It offers beautifully crafted narratives and moments replete with happiness and sadness, all while offering elegies to some of Ross’ loved ones. “Don’t ever tell any hamburgers anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

Happysad reading!