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A Novel
by Natalie Guerrero
An electric coming-of-age novel that explores grief, family, sexuality, and love as an ambitious young woman from Washington Heights tries to make it on Broadway—by a striking new voice in fiction.
How much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice in order to chase your dreams?
After her sister Nena's sudden death, Xiomara, an Afro-Latina singer and actress born and raised in Washington Heights, is numb. With her sister gone, Xiomara is painfully close to thirty, living in a tiny apartment with her ultra-Catholic Puerto Rican mother, and having the same shitty sex with the same shitty men that she's been entertaining for years. Behind on rent despite two minimum-wage jobs, one of which involves singing show tunes while serving pancakes to tourists at Ellen's Stardust Diner, Xiomara is bitingly cynical, especially in her grief, and barely treading water.
But when a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to audition for Manny Santos, the most charismatic director of the moment, falls into her lap, it seems to Xiomara like a second chance to pursue the dream she thought she'd left behind has finally come. Meanwhile, something about Santi, a new coworker at the print shop where she spends half of her days photocopying other performers' headshots, starts to tug at the threads of her apathy. Nothing is simple, and soon Xiomara finds herself interacting with the ugliest sides of the industry and the powerful men that control it. While Xiomara grapples with the hard truth that sometimes the closer you are to your dreams, the further away from yourself you become, she is forced to ask herself if she has what it takes to build a new shiny life without losing the truth of her old one.
With hopeful spirit and unapologetic energy, My Train Leaves at Three is a coming-of-age story about the balancing act between moving on and moving forward.
"An immersive and culturally acute coming-of-age story convincingly set on the darker side of the New York theater industry." —Kirkus Reviews
"In the third act, Guerrero guides her protagonist toward redemption but loses track of the plot. Still, the novel offers sharp insights on the effects of exploitation, loss, and self-debasement. The protagonist's strong voice carries this slightly scattered coming-of-age tale." —Publishers Weekly
"With My Train Leaves at Three Natalie Guerrero has entered the proverbial room, belted out her opening number and dropped the mic, leaving the reader not just enthralled and delighted with this debut ... it contains [a] wondrous piece of magic: the city of New York. My heart sung with this stirring reminder that anything is possible in this wild city." —Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Anita de Monte Laughs Last
"My Train Leaves at Three is an act of alchemy: Guerrero takes the numbness of grief and the mangled aspirations of youth, and transforms them into moments and characters that are searingly alive, achingly gorgeous in their hard-won wisdom." —Torrey Peters, author of Stag Dance
This information about My Train Leaves at Three was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Natalie Guerrero is a writer based in Los Angeles, California. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Electric Literature, Byline, Goop, and Blavity. Natalie's long-form work includes "On Silence," an essay published in Hungry Hearts (Dial Press), and Walking in My Joy (Amistad), an essay collection by actress Jenifer Lewis that Natalie co-authored. She has previously held positions at HarperCollins, WME Books, and Macro/M88. In her "free time," she can be found walking her dog, Tupac, in the hills of Los Feliz.
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