Parvana lives during the time of the Taliban invasion. Everything is crazy no women allowed outside without an escort, and so her mother and older sister Nooria are trapped inside. Parvana though is lucky, her dad lost a leg in a bombing and needs her support to go to the market and back. So life is just teetering along in the one room apartment with her mother, father, younger brother (Ali), younger sister (Maryam), and Nooria. Then one night Taliban soldiers come into there house and arrest her dad. Life is starting to break apart until she runs, literally, into one of her mothers old friends in the market. She visits and comes up with a plan. Parvana will have to dress as a boy and carry on her fathers work at the market. She sells the things they have but eventually they begin to run out of things to sell. Then one day a tea boy drops his cups and Parvana helps him pick them up. When she looks up into the face of the boy she gasps, this is no boy this is her old classmate Shauzia. Together they collect money digging bones and earn enough to buy trays with neck straps and goods to sell. One day she goes home and guess what her sister is going to get married. She stays with her mothers friend and then one day her father comes back. A while later she found a young woman who tells them that the town where her sister is getting married was captured by the Taliban. And that they were shooting people on the street. The book ends as she and her father go off to find her mother and siblings.