Emma Jarvie is your typical teenager—sure, she’s an Iranian American immigrant living in Santa Ana, CA, a neighborhood becoming notorious for its growing violence. But like every teenage girl, she worries about boys, tries to keep her grades up in school, and shops for makeup with her best friend, Julie.

All right, so things aren’t as they seem. So she doesn’t have a father in the picture, and her mother is slowly losing a battle to something unseen. So her older sister says she’ll be applying to a distant university, leaving Emma to take care of their mother alone. So she’s turned to the streets to try and make something out of nothing from her riches-to-rags life. She can still handle this.

But when she turns to Julie for support, she encounters Julie’s seductive ex-boyfriend, Joseph, and everything she’s worked so hard to build starts crumbling apart. Danger is closer to her than ever—but with building frustration about her constant struggles at school and at home, she’s willing to risk it all.

Based on true events and infused with tenderness and dark humor, Staring at Medusa is a meditation on family and friendship, isolation and belonging, violence and care, as Emma navigates being a typical teenager against a backdrop of unique circumstances.