title: Looking for Anita
author: Ramer, Wendy
description: How important are childhood friendships in determining who we become? How dangerous is nostalgia when it settles too deeply in our hearts?
   In the summer of 1976, newly-orphaned Jennifer meets Betty, the girl 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 Betty's family mysteriously disappears four years later during Cuba's Mariel Boatlift, Jennifer's newfound sense of abandonment sparks her decades-long struggle to accept her past and find her place in the present.
   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.