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.