It's unprecedented, even in the twenty-first century, for a young Sicilian woman to defy the centuries-old mandate, "Family is everything!"--but twenty-two-year-old Mariella Russo is desperate to escape Sicily. She's being relentlessly coerced into an engagement with her wealthy college sweetheart--a young man from a prominent, powerful family--by her envious and erratic mother, who hopes the match will increase her own ignominious social status. Suddenly, Mariella's lifelong home has become a claustrophobic island. In a bid for independence and an attempt to escape entrapment, she flees to San Francisco.

But Mariella's bête noire--entrapment--follows her to San Francisco, where everyone wants more from her than she wants to give. Her American roommate, Leslie, turns out to be a gay man rather than the woman she imagined; her employer/lover is pressuring her to live with him; and her neurotic mother is haunting her, wreaking havoc and embarrassment. An urgent return trip to Sicily puts Mariella to the ultimate challenge: will she submit to tradition, or choose a life she wants for herself?