Daphna Ziman is on a mission to help kids placed in foster care and she’s picked a novel way to do it – quite literally.
Ziman, a Los Angeles-based philanthropist and activist for foster children, has written a work of fiction, a legal thriller whose protagonist was orphaned as a child.
In The Gray Zone, Kelly Jensen is on the run from the law following the brutal murder of a Las Vegas politician. But with the help of a sharp-minded, handsome defense lawyer, Kelly could clear her name.
Sound like a fast-paced, breezy crime thriller for any summer reading list? Well, it is – and it isn’t.
Ziman’s aim is two-fold: to get people to read her story like they would any other thriller from the likes of James Patterson or Harlan Coben. But there’s also another, more important aim: to engage readers with a serious problem in America, the plight of kids in foster care who, Ziman says, can be victims of neglect, abuse, human trafficking and even sex slavery.
“You can write a [nonfiction] book and put the facts and statistics in it and nobody will read it, or you can take the public, the readers, on a journey,” Ziman told Reuters about why she chose to write the novel.
“This way, I could create something that would stay around forever, and maybe somebody would be interested in transferring it into a movie” or some other medium, she said.
Ziman’s approach to raising awareness may be a novel but it’s hardly new. Fiction has long been used to expose truths that many officials might prefer were better left unexposed.
There was, of course, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle which blew the lid off unsanitary practices in Chicago’s meat-packing business. Charles Dickens also looked at the plight of English orphan boys in Oliver Twist.
Adding to Ziman’s zeal is a personal reason: She has adopted two daughters out of the foster care system and founded nonprofit group Children Uniting Nations (CUN), to raise money and awareness about issues impacting kids.
Not all children are victimized by foster parents, of course, but the number who are is hard to determine because they don’t speak out publicly as children.