When twelve-year-old Waka’s parents fear she’s can’t understand basic Japanese, they make the drastic decision to ship her to Tokyo to live with a strict grandmother she barely knows, attend a Japanese public school, and immerse herself in the language. Goodbye friends, sixth grade graduation, and her All-American summer vacation. Plucked from her straight-A-student life in rural Kansas, Waka is sent halfway across the globe where she embarks on what feels like the hardest five months of her life. Here, she must overcome her embarrassingly low reading levels, learn the incredibly complicated writing system called kanji, survive the social gauntlet of classroom clique politics, and attempt to understand her standoffish grandmother, Obaasama. Even though this is the country her parents came from, Waka has never felt more like an outsider.