It’s rare in 2024 to read a fiction book written in the first person. It seems as though we’ve moved away from that in literary fiction, instead preferring third person text that’s nonetheless deep in the mind of the protagonist. Bad Habit broke that mold, delivering prose that felt very much like a memoir in both its directness and intensity.

In Alana S. Portero’s new book, translated from Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem, an unnamed protagonist grows up in 1980s and 90s Spain on a journey of discovering herself and accepting her trans identity. I didn’t know much about Madrid’s politics before starting this book, but it appears as though heroin was brought into low-income areas there in a similar way crack cocaine was throughout the US. This is where our protagonist finds herself, surrounded by children dying of overdoses in a community that nonetheless takes care of its members as best they can.

The choice to tell this book entirely through the eyes of someone who wasn’t even given a name was stunning. It lent an emotional gravitas to every single word that could not have been achieved any other way. As I followed her journey through youth into adulthood, I found myself rooting for the character while simultaneously understanding her mistakes.

She struggled to find herself in her hometown, but did relate to the older trans women which she met, and it was beautiful to see the intergenerational friendships play out at each stage of her life. Bad Habit truly was a foray into the world of queerness and what it’s like to know you are different and still be unsure of what you want to do about it.

I listened to an audiobook copy of this novel (thanks to Libro.fm for their influencer ALC), and I would recommend. I was completely immersed in the world and thought the narrator did a great job of putting emphasis on the correct things while still going with the flow of the writing. As I mentioned earlier, this book was translated from Spanish, and while I obviously have no idea how the original sounded, I do think the translation was well done and transmitted a certain beauty into the words.

I would highly recommend this book, especially for fans of memoirs and literary fiction. It was a powerful story, and I would love to read more from the author one day.

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