Sabrina Bernardo's first novel, Innercity Girl Like Me, is bound to resonate with Winnipeggers.

The teen fiction book follows Maria - aka G Child - a Winnipeg girl who's 'jumped' into a street gang at the age of 13 and becomes immersed in the gangster lifestyle: partying with her crew, the Diablos, committing crimes, fighting with rival gang members, and selling crack for a dial-a-dealer operation.

At times, the situations and characters in Innercity Girl Like Me seem ripped right out of local headlines. The drive-by murder of Jeremiah, for example ("the cutest little wannabe gangster"), is eerily similar to 1995's real-life killing of 13-year-old "Beeper" Spence, while the callous disregard for human life shown by Gina McKay - a major player in the Diablos - mirrors that displayed by a 16-year-old girl who shocked Winnipeggers earlier this month when she laughed to police about being a passenger in a stolen truck that crashed into a cab and killed the driver.

The fine line between fact and fiction is no accident, says Bernardo, who was in Winnipeg last week for the book's inaugural reading.

While never in a gang, Bernardo, who was raised in the Maples and now lives in Toronto, says she based her novel on what she heard through friends or witnessed first-hand while hanging out with gangsters and drug dealers as a young adult.

"It's pretty much all true, except the names of the people," she says. "Some of the situations might be a little exaggerated, but I would say it's about 80% true."

Fast-paced and profanity-laced, Innercity Girl Like Me gets up close and personal with Winnipeg's street-gang culture. Many of Bernardo's characters come from dysfunctional homes with intergenerational gang affiliation, and struggle with poverty, addictions, domestic violence and sexual exploitation. Some find redemption; others end up dead.

"That's just reality," she says. "I just wrote how it was."

The novel began as a short story written for a creative-writing class, and took about two years to complete. Having experienced violence in her own relationships, Bernardo, now 27, says writing became a form of self-medication.

"When I started writing it, I had no job, I had nothing to do... I'd go out a lot, I'd party a lot, I'd drink a lot - I was drunk a lot - and I'd write it in my spare time, kind of like as a hobby, as self-therapy. My characters were there for me when nobody else was."

Each of the book's four main female characters represents a part of her personality, she says - even Gina, who she calls "my pissed-off girl."

"I know she's a really easy character to hate, but I love her. I love her passion," Bernardo says.

Winnipeggers aren't the only ones paying attention to Innercity Girl Like Me. It was picked up by Harper Collins (a coup for an unsolicited manuscript written by an unknown writer) and Bernardo's agent is now negotiating the movie rights. Meanwhile, several schools in Ontario are considering adding it to their curriculums - proof, perhaps, that good things can come from bad experiences.