Laurie Lico Albanese's "Hester" opens as Isobel Gamble arrives in the port of Salem in the early 1820s, after leaving Scotland. Isobel has a gift for the colors she uses in embroidery and dressmaking, but she has hidden the true extent of her talent: a form of synesthesia that allows her to sense colors in spoken and written language that make her sewing an enchantment to others.
As a small child, her synesthesia glows. "I lived in a world of magic and color then — my mother's voice a sapphire stream flecked with emeralds, my father's a soft caramel. In summer I ran barefoot through the valleys with my cousins and kin and saw their voices rise up in vibrant wisps of yellow and gold. The wind was sometimes fierce pink, and the sound of the waterfall on rocks glistened silver."
But that sense of the world is disrupted when, in mentioning to her mother that letters have colors, her mother berates and hits her. Women who have expressed those kinds of thoughts have been called "crazy" or "witch." Isobel's mother is afraid that such a fate would befall her, and so, Isobel learns to hide her own perceptions.
