Fourteen-year-old Paulina faces different situations that destroy her home environment and force her, just a teenager, to become the main source of income in her family amidst the agitation of post-revolutionary Mexico. What's more, she needs to deal with her capacity to discover and to question the world around her. Paulina's left-wing and feminist sympathies are shown in the story, which leads her to rub shoulders with important figures in the arts and politics of her time; in turn, those ideas affect her decisions when it comes to love. She always rejects the easy way out and the scheme of values that middle-class members continue to defend to this day.