Even though it is summer Sadiq goes to religious school four days a week to study the Quran; he and his friends find their teacher, Mr. Kassim, strict and intimidating, but when Sadiq finds out that Mr. Kassim has a injured shoulder he decides to volunteer to help with the gardening--and he convinces his friends to volunteer as well.

Tamika, a fifteen-year-old hearing-impaired girl, Jimmi, an eighteen-year-old veteran who stopped taking his antipsychotic medication, and sixteen-year-old Fatima, an illegal immigrant from Africa, meet and connect in their Bronx, New York, neighborhood, with devastating results.

Sadiq's father is going on a business trip, but before he goes he tells Sadiq a story of the Desert Star, which fits in perfectly with Sadiq's third grade class field trip to the planetarium, and inspires Sadiq to build a simple telescope to study the stars when his father returns.