Looking for Anita — Wendy Ramer

How important are childhood friendships in determining who we become? How crippling is nostalgia when it settles too deeply in our hearts?

In the summer of 1976, newly-orphaned Jennifer meets Betty, who lives across the street with her overprotective immigrant parents. When the girls become best friends, they develop a camaraderie that erases the cultural divide of 1970s Miami. But when Bettys family mysteriously disappears four years later later amidst the news of Cubas Mariel Boatlift, Jennifers renewed sense of abandonment sparks her decades-long struggle to accept her past and find her place in the present.

Winner of ForeWord Reviews' 2009 Book of the Year, Looking for Anita follows Jennifer through adolescence to middle age, from Miami to Spain and home again, as she fights the pain of inescapable nostalgia and unanswered questions. Just as she is ready to move on, Jennifer discovers what became of Betty. What she finds will challenge everything she believes to be true in this story of childhood friendship and the magic that can happen if we never lose hope.