What unfolds is an intensely captivating, surprisingly youthful, and immediately contemporary narrative set during the years of World War I in Brazil; a love story intertwined with suffering; the adventure of a double female assertion of identity - lived and validated through the means of language. At the age of twenty, still a minor, a young woman from the American South elopes with a married man twice her age to Brazil, threatened by legal actions from the abandoned wife and soon surprised by the outbreak of World War I in Brazil. Fearing persecution, the couple changes their names, cutting off all possibilities of relying on the material security and professional qualifications of their past lives. In extreme poverty, they struggle to get by. Eventually, they move 400 miles inland.