Zed.

Lori A. Dunn is a ESL teacher, instructional designer, and freelance
writer in New Westminster, B.C.

The title character of Zed is a resourceful 12-year-old surviving alone in the living hell of a downtown tenement building teeming with human vermin. Zed is a very resourceful girl, moving through this world of non-stop trades of food, items, and information with a natural skill, usually coming out on top. She is a survivor, with sharp wits and careful wariness, and playing her cards close to her chest in the microcosm of street life that exists in this building. And the dangers are rampant—crazed addicts, rapists, and sundry creeps abound, not to mention the fact that little girls are being murdered.

Zed’s life on this precipice of blood-curdling danger is mesmerizing, and watching and waiting to see what she will do next, what deal she will cut, what choices she will make, is spellbinding reading. McClung has captured the essence of this resourceful little girl, bottled her up, and spread her out on the page so that the reader walks the halls, stalks the news, and finesses the trades with her as an appalled witness taking a back seat to the adventurer. The characters that share this world with Zed—the Father, the dumpster Rat, the barely verbal security guard, the welfare mothers, the Professor—are seen through her eyes, and their worth is measured by her strict code of values.

In a world where survival depends on what you have to trade, the odds are 8:1 against that Zed will make it out alive.