Bad Habit
Affecting and poetic ... In a marketplace of often narrowly defined literary categories, Portero’s book — like the best books that feature trans characters — shows us that a "trans novel" can actually be anything it wants to be. Bad Habit is about identity, yes, but in its keenly observed realism, it’s also a family story of parents and children, and at the same time, it offers a fresh angle on narratives of the working class. And undoubtedly, it is a tale of a city.
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Portero writes with such a fine sensitivity to the balance of politics and poetry, community and childhood, that Bad Habit proves itself instead to be an exemplary and fresh example of the trans bildungsroman ... True to the conventions of the cronica, Bad Habit unselfconsciously shuttles the political into its weave in ways that are rare in American fiction.
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Portero balances long, meaty passages of self-reflection with vivid scenes grounded in sensory detail. The resulting mix reads like a fictional memoir ... Sometimes Mara Faye Lethem’s translation feels a bit clunky; occasional oddly constructed sentences may take a moment to untangle. But this hardly matters, because the prose overall is so fresh. The protagonist’s ability to see herself and the people in her life both up close and from a distance is irresistible. Bad Habit is queer fiction at its painful, honest, celebratory best.
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