When twelve-year-old Dalya is dragged to Istanbul to help sell her family's ancestral home, the visit begins unpromisingly.

Most of the aged mansion is off-limits because it's falling apart, her father is ignoring her and her great aunt keeps prattling on about a family curse.

Despite warnings against it, Dalya tiptoes upstairs, where she finds an old bottle of magic ink hidden under a floorboard.

She asks the bottle's jinn (aka genie) to grant her a simple wish... to send her home. Except the jinn interprets "go home" to mean "send me back in time and turn me into a cat." Then Dalya must set off on a wild adventure through Istanbul's animal underworld to find the jinn with the power to set things right.