Elsa Martinelli nee Wolcott

Elsa Martinelli nee Wolcott, is the main character of the novel, and the novel is mostly told from her third person perspective. Elsa is the mother of Loreda and Ant, and one stillborn baby Lorenzo, whom she grieves. The novel starts the day before her twenty-fifth birthday and she describes herself as essentially a spinster. According to others she is unattractive, “skinny as a rake handle. Not nearly as pretty as her sisters” or from her own perspective, “She was ‘too’ everything - too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself” (6). Trapped in her parents house under the guise of a childhood illness that supposedly left her unable to have a life of her own, she eventually breaks out (motivated by novels), and finds Rafe, making a family and identity of her own.

Most prominently, Elsa represents the challenges every day women in...