Elspeth Baker is is almost 19 when we meet her. She s an intelligent college coed, a red-haired beauty, unmarried and pregnant. Everyone around her seems to know just how she should handle her predicament, but Elspeth has some strong opinions herself on that subject. As she goes about making those opinions known, the reader is swept up in her life.

Elspeth has an infallible you-know-what detector and isn t shy about letting anyone know when it s beeping loudly, including rabbis, doctors, nurses, or any other authority figure. She says to a pompous would-be author trying to put the make on her, "...sometimes it s hard to tell a wordsmith from a bullshitter. It s a very thin line. You think a book like A Fireplace in Winter isn t literature because it doesn t have all this obscurity and beautiful language that s hard to understand. But obscurity and veiled references, and allusions and allusions, showing how sensitive they are--that isn t everything. Maybe the reason some of these guys make their books so hard to understand is that if people could understand it, they d know it s just a bunch of crap."