Bad Habit

Alana S. Portero's novel follows a trans girl coming of age in the heroin-era poverty of a working-class Madrid neighborhood in the 1980s and 90s, and critics have consistently pointed to how it refuses to be just one kind of book: it works simultaneously as a trans coming-of-age story, a family narrative, and a portrait of working-class Spanish life, woven together rather than treated as separate arguments. Reviewers situated it in the Spanish crónica tradition, praising how naturally it integrates the political into the texture of the narrative instead of pausing to make its case explicitly. The prose, in Mara Faye Lethem's translation, has drawn some minor criticism for occasional awkward phrasing, but the emotional precision of the found-family scenes among trans women in the neighborhood has been the most consistently singled-out strength.