Pretty with a fist. That’s how some might describe Jemma Dalembert. Survival motivates her. Love for family. Loyalty. Respect. She’s only sixteen year old, but Jemma Dalembert will  devastate you if you cross her. Why? Because she can.

Jemma is three quarters French-Canadian, raised in a family of Maine fishermen, now down-and-out, unemployed and  willing to do anything to survive. She is also quarter Micmac Indian. Her grandmother says she is a shape-shifter, the last member of the Wolf Clan, the protector of her family and her tribe. Jemma may believe this, does believe it, but her father is only interested in how she can  help him keep the family going.

Nothing comes easy to Jemma. She can’t read. She’s dropped out of school. No school even wants her because she has anger management issues and is always getting into fights. She works a ten hour day packing fish in cold storage. She runs numbers for her father. Most important, she is engaged in the world of underground fist fighting where you survive by winning.

Her life is one lived on the gritty edge of ‘think fast, think faster than the other guy.’ When her father and her boyfriend commit a theft, stealing the winning lottery ticket from another criminal enterprise, Jemma is accused of robbery and murder. A local cop, a rogue police officer named Giroux, has it in for the  Dalemberts. He would like nothing better than to deal with Jemma and her  father permanently.

Jemma has no choice but to go on the run. She has a single thread of hope. Find her older brother Rich who has taken up the life of a professional mixed martial arts fighter. She adores him, would die for her brother. Running away with all her worldly possessions in a backpack, including brass knuckles and a switchblade, Jemma flees to Boston. Only Rich is no longer fighting. Instead, he is on a steady descent into schizophrenia, forcing Jemma to take an offer from a local mixed martial arts promoter. Fight for him. Win for him. Do whatever it takes for him.

Jemma might capitulate, but she is never disloyal to who she really is. As Giroux and the Boston police close in on her, as the fighting promoter who would corrupt her innocence prods her into a world of survival of the ‘fightest,’ Jemma finds the Micmac warrior in her soul, the true shape-shifter. Falling in love and saving those she cares about matter most in the world. Fighting may kill her, but the greatest sacrifice of all awaits.

“Because I can” is Jemma’s mantra. A 21st century Eponine. In a world of betrayal, violence and survival at all costs, no one is as tough and resilient as this teenage girl.