MY TRAIN LEAVES AT THREE by Natalie Guerrero - Spotlight

 

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.

How much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice 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.

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. 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.

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.