Abby Carson is not a bad student, but she really does not like doing her schoolwork. When a warning letter arrives in the mail, Abby learns she is in danger of having to repeat the sixth grade. To save her school year, she takes on a special extra-credit project: finding a pen pal in a faraway country. Her very first letter travels all the way to a small village in Afghanistan. The village elders decide that the best student in their school, a boy named Sadeed, should be the one to write back. But in their culture, it is not proper for a boy to write letters to a girl. To solve the problem, Sadeed writes the letters and his younger sister signs her name. As the letters travel back and forth across the world, Abby and Sadeed must navigate huge cultural differences and strict traditions. Through their secret correspondence, these young students are about to discover that they have much more in common than they ever imagined.