Like many of Cadnum's YA novels, Edge is set in the San Francisco Bay area. Zachary and his mother live in Oakland, while his father lives across the bay in San Francisco.

Almost all of Cadnum's characters are children of divorced parents. Although it appears at first as if Zachary is a child of the streets, he lives quite comfortably with his real estate agent mother. His father is a writer. This landscape is also familiar territory for Cadnum who says he is "interested in the problems of being upward and mobile. When you have parents who .. . have interesting professions .. . what pressure has this put on the family." Zachary's school, however, is not the stereotypical suburban school, instead it seems more like an urban battleground.

The first scene of the book depicts Oakland's Lake Merritt as exactly that, an urban battleground. Here, kids from all over Oakland, "a...