• Age: 17 to 18
• Grade: 12

Mel McLeod is an aspiring journalist determined to make it to the front during the Great War. Too bad she’s a woman.

As the 20th century dawns, Mary Ellen McLeod uses her family’s connections to obtain a position at the Toronto Telegram, where her career is shaped by two legendary journalists: syndicated columnist Kit Coleman and Bill Douglass, the Telegram’s star writer. With Coleman’s encouragement, she follows domestic stories that matter, from a terrible fire in Corktown to the huge loss of life in a Great Lakes hurricane, and Douglass helps to polish her reporting of these events. Nicknamed Mel by Telegram editor-in-chief Black Jack Robinson, she comes into her own by bringing human interest to the fact-based reporting of her male colleagues.

Years earlier, Kit Coleman had become the world’s first formally accredited female war correspondent, but her male colleagues had conspired to keep her from the front during the Spanish-American War. As the Great War looms, Mel is determined to achieve the success that was denied her mentor.

Bruce Kemp is an award-winning writer/photographer whose work has appeared in several one-man shows. He is the co-author of the travel photo book Gifts of the Okanagan, produced with his wife Laurie Carter. Bruce goes to great depths to get his pictures as an underwater photographer and has climbed more than one mountain while studying photography at the Banff Centre for the Arts. His stock files, developed on assignment, now provide images to magazines, newspapers and book publishers in Canada and the United States. His freelance writing appears in newspapers and magazines around the world. Bruce lives in West Kelowna, BC.

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