As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, and Simone de Beauvoir. As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer, while her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she feels herself to be, and she is forever changed as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly.
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