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A review by abij
Bad Habit by Alana S. Portero
This was soooo wonderful.
Bad Habit follows a young trans woman growing up in a working class Madrid neighbourhood. She watches young people around her die from drug overdoses and older people work themselves into illness, and she finds community with other outsiders/queer people that she meets.
The novel is full of pain and violence but uplifted by the main characters attachment to the people around her. The author's writing about women, whether cis or trans, is some of the best and most loving I've read. The main character pays the most attention to the women that society treats badly (e.g. the old woman accused of being a witch, the elderly trans woman who cares for her mother, the group of sex workers she becomes friends with), and some of the best parts in the novel are when these women are being described.
Overall I'd recommend that readers be careful because there is a lot of violence/homophobia/transphobia depictions in this book that might be upsetting, but it's well worth the read. Portero beautifully depicts a perspective that I think is missing from a lot of queer discourse, as personally I'm used to seeing a lot of middle-class problems be pushed to the forefront. It was refreshing to read a book that concerned itself with discussion of class as well as queerness, and how the two intersect.
Bad Habit follows a young trans woman growing up in a working class Madrid neighbourhood. She watches young people around her die from drug overdoses and older people work themselves into illness, and she finds community with other outsiders/queer people that she meets.
The novel is full of pain and violence but uplifted by the main characters attachment to the people around her. The author's writing about women, whether cis or trans, is some of the best and most loving I've read. The main character pays the most attention to the women that society treats badly (e.g. the old woman accused of being a witch, the elderly trans woman who cares for her mother, the group of sex workers she becomes friends with), and some of the best parts in the novel are when these women are being described.
Overall I'd recommend that readers be careful because there is a lot of violence/homophobia/transphobia depictions in this book that might be upsetting, but it's well worth the read. Portero beautifully depicts a perspective that I think is missing from a lot of queer discourse, as personally I'm used to seeing a lot of middle-class problems be pushed to the forefront. It was refreshing to read a book that concerned itself with discussion of class as well as queerness, and how the two intersect.