Resau, Laura

Zeeta, a down-to-earth girl, spends years with her flighty mom traveling the world, but when they try to settle down in Mazunte, Mexico, where Zeeta's true love Wendell is interning as a nature photographer, Zeeta is convinced that Mazunte is going to be their home, until she and Wendell uncover more about her elusive father's past.

Fifteen-year-old Zeeta comes to terms with her flighty mother and their itinerant life when, soon after moving to Ecuador, she helps an American teenager find his birth father in a nearby village.

Sixteen-year-old Sophie has been frail and delicate since her premature birth, but discovers her true strength during a journey through Mexico, where the six-year-old orphan her family hopes to adopt was born, and to Guatemala, where her would-be boyfriend hopes to find his mother and plans to remain.

After eleven-year-old Zitlally's father is deported to Mexico, she takes refuge in her trailer park's forest of rusted car parts, where she befriends a spunky neighbor and finds a stray dog that she nurses back to health and believes she must keep safe so that her father will return.