Panama

At fifteen, a girl moves from a small town in Ohio to Panama while her father takes part in building the Panama Canal. This trip comes just at the right time for her. She yearns to see more of the world than her small mid-western town has to offer. She wants to meet new people. Visit exciting places. Panama with its lush rainforests and myriad of people is the perfect place for her desires to be fulfilled. Then she meets Frederico, a Spanish aristocrat who is working as a digger, one of the masses who toils daily in the heat and the dust and the danger of the canal. He embodies everything she's looking for: he's exotic, exciting, intelligent and pushes her beyond the limits her sequestered life has set for her. Shelby Hiatt got the idea to write about the Panama Canal after visiting it and getting to know many Zoners, descendants of the people who lived and worked on the canal.