1943. When Elise Sontag's father is arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi sympathiser, the family is sent to an internment camp in Texas, where Elise feels stripped of everything beloved and familiar. The only thing that makes the camp bearable is meeting fellow internee Mariko Inoue, a Japanese American teen from Los Angeles. Together in the desert wilderness, Elise and Mariko hold tight the dream of being young American women with a future beyond the fences. But when the Sontag family is exchanged for American prisoners behind enemy lines in Germany, Elise will face head on the person the war desires to make of her. In that devastating crucible, she must discover whether she has the will to rise above prejudice and hatred and reclaim her own destiny, or disappear into the image others have cast upon her.