Ester Prynn, whose mother named her in admiration of Hawthorne’s passionate heroine, lives in the small coastal town of Half Moon Bay with her husband and two teenage sons. One morning, at the convenience store where she works for an angry, misogynist boss, a masked robber barges in, violently threatening her and her co-worker, making off with a few hundred dollars, and, it turns out, unsettling Ester’s life. Restless and unfulfilled, Ester is a familiar character: a woman who has devoted herself to the care and feeding of her family, is bored with her husband and frustrated by her sullen younger son, and is watching her father succumb to dementia while she confronts her fears about aging. The long-ago deaths of her mother and college boyfriend still haunt her. She fantasizes about “packing up and starting over someplace new, where no one knew her,” but she doesn’t have the money, or the will, to leave Half Moon Bay. As Rohan’s novel gently unfolds, Ester is prodded toward different paths of self-discovery. One is joining a newly formed women’s chorus. When the director asks for suggestions for the group’s name, Ester suggests Sing, I: “a salute,” she explains, “and a commitment to putting ourselves and our voices front and center.” Another is quitting her dead-end job. She soon finds a better one, as hostess at a popular restaurant, where she is shaken by her attraction to her female boss. Rohan’s panoply of characters—cisgender, transgender, lesbian, nonbinary, and pansexual—bring diversity to Ester’s small world. “Don’t you think most of us are on a spectrum,” a transgender woman opines, “and we could go any which way depending on attraction and connection.” That’s the question Ester and her friends ask themselves as they examine deeply held prejudices and hidden desires.
