Katherine O'Connor, a Seattle medical transcriptionist, has a booming sideline business, writing other people's Christmas letters. A run-in with Dr. Wynn Jeffries, however, ruins her holiday cheer. Katherine's sister is a devotee of Jeffries's Free Child movement, advocating "no boundaries for kids," a technique that has turned Katherine's into terrors. Jeffries just happens to live in Katherine's building, and their debate over parenting technique turns predictably, if perplexingly, to lust