Customer Reviews

Zed

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The book is very simple: there is a girl and she wants to live. The book is very complex: The Tower is a world, a philosophy course and a study of human interaction. The characters are amazing and outragous in the way people become in times of desperation, the situation is desperate and the calm voice in it all is a 12 year old girl who works endlessly on how to end the day alive. It reads like it is written from the war-battered cities dotted around the world, but is instead a special corner we choose to ignore in our own cities: New York, LA, Chicago, Tornoto, Vancouver, London, Liverpool, Paris

If you like thrillers, I recommend this book. If you like literature, I recommend this book. If you like being carried along in a story to a place you never knew existed, to be returned, shaking but safe, back to your bedroom, then I recommend this book. If you want to know what russian roulette is like without having someone clean your brains off the wall, I recommend this book.

This book will make you feel things, and that's rare. It doesn't cajole you or make you misty eyed, but gives you the charge of a junkie, covered in oozing infected pus, pawing at you, demanding attention. Like it or not, you will feel things, you will care about Zed, even as you must wait, powerless to help her. If you think of yourself as a reader, maybe you think you've seen it all. Then read this.

Elizabeth McClung's ZED is a marvel. For a debut novel it is astonishingly assured and competent. Perhaps the best first novel I have read since Iain Banks' THE WASP FACTORY. Too much of Canadian fiction is tired, mannered and moribund. ZED is years beyond the usual Can-Lit tapioca that passes for our national literature. Her 13-year old protagonist is tough, likable, a survivor in a world full of adult monsters. Set almost entirely within the confines of an unnamed apartment building in an unnamed city, ZED is claustrophobic, terrifying and, gulp, at times very, very funny. Filled with fascinating characterizations and unforgettable imagery. Published by a small press on Canada's West Coast but I predict there are bigger things ahead for Ms. McClung. She has, as they say, all the right stuff.

Zed lives in a place the City would rather believe didn't exist. They send over a food truck once a week to keep the Tower residents from wandering over into Civilization, and send medics to collect the dead. The Tower is a stinking, dangerous high-rise full of drug addiction, mental illness, and dirty dealing. This is Zed's playground.

McClung writes a smart, tough adolescent with just the right balance of naivete and insight. She doesn't wrap up all the loose ends, but to Zed the loose ends don't matter as long as the deal is done.

I wanted to like--no, love--this book. The subject matter--a 12-year-old surviving in a not-so-far-fretched dystopian--is exciting and potentially unnerving; much of the writing is tersely evocative and dryly humorous. But there's something self-indulgent about many of the writer's choices, from plotting to description to character development.
Take the title character, Zed. Tough, orphaned, living by her wits, Zed has numerous predecessors in literature (Pippi Longstocking, Dido Twite, Deenie Gauthier, to name just three). But whereas those characters were all given a backstory to help explain in part what makes them tick, author McClung doesn't feel the need to do that with Zed. We have no idea how she ended up in the Bosch-like nightmare of a tower block that is her home, how she learned to read somewhat, why Luc (the evil genius-cum-Danny Zuko of the building) is so avuncular toward her for most of the book, and how she became the scrounger that she is. We're expected to take McClung's word for all of this, which makes it tough to care too deeply about Zed.
McClung also seems to have decided that there was no need to describe visuals, though she's more generous when it comes to describing odors. Is there a reason we don't know what Zed or Luc look like?
Then there are the plot points and details that aren't true to even the fictional reality. Early on Zed is described as looking younger than 12, largely because she doesn't get three square meals a day. How, then, does she muster up the strength to take down bulky grown men hired as bodyguards/bruisers, let alone survive some brutal torture?
This book angered me in a way few books have--but not because of the subject matter. It angered me because McClung is clearly a talent writer with a fierce imagination, but lax editing (or a lack of an editor altogether) resulted in her strengths being obscured by ther weaknesses.