The day she turns fifteen Zoë ditches high school in Chandler, Arizona, and is picked up by an elderly man driving a step van turned into a laboratory. He promises to teach her all he knows if she trusts him to take her where she is fated to go. Their travels take them to Topeka's Zoomorphological Wonders of the World, an abandoned movie theater outside Chicago, and the garden courtyard of Marquis de Sade's castle in Provence for an auction of sex slaves abducted from around the world.

At turns absurd, poignant, and comic, Zoë is a quicksilver phantasmagoria and enchanted road trip unlike any other, where travel is spectral and the traveling com- panions, if not real, are temporary visitors from imaginary worlds sent to show a girl lost in the moronic inferno of 21st century America the best way to her brightest possible future.