It's 1985. Exhausted by her complicated family, seventeen year old Tamar Kelly longs for something different. She seizes an opportunity to spend a year as an exchange student in Thailand, which sounds as far away as it's possible to go. There, across the world from her home in California, she finds excitement, confusion, new kinds of complication, and new sources of exhaustion. It's not easy, but it's definitely different, and it might just change everything.