Finding Your Way

Zanda is seventeen. She is Latvian. She wants three things in life: to stay in her home country, date her boyfriend, and have a career. There is a problem with each of these things, though.

Zanda’s friends and even her family think that she should board a plane and depart to England the moment she graduates from school. Her boyfriend is intelligent and every mother’s dream, but he is Russian. She plans to study at the university but hates the thought of having to live on the ugly outskirts of the capital with her parents for four more years.

And then, there is Zanda’s love for the countryside. Witch’s Pond is a small, lovely town where her grandmother lives and where Zanda spends her summers.

Zanda feels torn between her equally ardent dreams about having a life in the capital and living in the countryside.

Meeting the infuriating and handsome nineteen-year-old Latvian guy Viestards, who like her has different views on how he should live his life, makes Zanda’s dilemmas even more complicated. However, Viestards’s dream to turn his land into a profitable venture is endangered. And it will take a lot of gumption to pursue this dream against all odds.

It is the summer of 2008, the last one before the global financial crisis. While for Latvia it promises to be a time of hardships and challenges, for Zanda’s family and for Viestards it might be a time of opportunities to change their lives.

There is a slight touch of magical realism in the book that conveys a deep connection many Latvians still have with ancient pagan roots and traditions.

“Finding Your Way” is a contemporary young adult novel set in Latvia in 2008.