Growing up in a small fishing village in 1980s Iran, eleven-year-old Saba Hafezi and her twin sister Mahtab are fascinated by America. When Saba suddenly finds herself abandoned, alone with her father in Iran, she is certain that her mother and sister have moved to America without her. Bereft, she aches for their company, and for the Western life. All her life she had been taught that "fate is in the blood," which must mean that twins will live the same life, even if separated by land and sea. Thus, over the next several years, as Saba falls in and out of love and struggles with the limited possibilities available to her as a woman in Iran, she imagines a simultaneous, parallel life, a Western version, for her sister. But where Saba's story has all the grit and brutality of real life in postrevolutionary Iran, her sister's life--as Saba envisions it--gives her a freedom and control that Saba can only dream of.