When Jillian Schedneck takes up a post teaching English to a classroom of UAE students in Abu Dhabi, she is young, idealistic, in love, and ready to take on the world. After an initial period of culture shock, she grows in confidence and begins to teach her students about Virginia Woolf and feminism. But it soon becomes clear that she'll also be doing some learning, as she finds her own cultural assumptions being challenged, and starts to realise how much her time in these desert cities will shape the woman she is to become.