Both Bugz and Feng emerge as rounded, complex characters, each rooted in their respective cultures and belief systems (in both worlds). The action scenes in the ’Verse are sharply handled and frequently surprising, while the relationship and family dramas of the real world are graceful, natural, and realistic. Kinew develops both the real and virtual storylines with considerable skill.
Feng is a member of Clan:LESS, who has suffered personally at the hands of Bugz’s ’Versona. Her status in the ’Verse is no secret – Bugz makes real-world profits from her VR adventures – but her two worlds collide when Feng, a gamer from China, arrives to live with his aunt, the doctor on the Rez. The Floraverse is as accepted and commonplace as Facebook or TikTok is today. It’s an exhilarating moment early on in the novel when she mounts a thunderbird.ĭespite its comforting contemporary feel, Walking in Two Worlds is set in a post-multiple-pandemics near future. Locked in perpetual conflict with Clan:LESS, the brutal male-supremacist horde led by the merciless Alpha, she draws on the power of the reality’s “natural” world and her cultural heritage to fight and survive. In the real world, Bugz – the protagonist of writer and politician Wab Kinew’s first fantasy novel for young readers, Walking in Two Worlds – is an Anishinaabe high schooler, a powwow dancer, daughter of the elected chief, and mired by insecurity about her appearance and fitting in.Īs Kinew writes, “In many ways, Bugz was just like everybody else … until she went online into the Floraverse.” In the Floraverse (’Verse for short) – a massive, decentralized virtual reality world – Bugz is practically a superhero.
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