To avoid failing English class, seventeen-year-old Max Callan signs up for a school penpal program that matches up students with deployed soldiers who have no one to write to. At first he's just doing it for the extra grades, but his correspondence with Captain Alastair Barrington-Stowsworth soon becomes a lifeline. Alastair is eloquent and caring, and his letters show Max that not all military men are abusive scum, like his late father. When Alastair asks what TV is and mentions trenches, Max pieces together an impossible truth. Alastair is not fighting in the modern Middle East like Max assumed, but in the trenches of France in 1916. Stranger still, Max might be falling in love with him.