Book Review: Bad Habit by Alana S. Portero
Everyone should read this.
I’ve been trying to figure out why I can’t read at the moment, why every book holds me for only a few moments before I dash it aside in frustration.
And it turns out, it’s Alana S.Portero’s fault entirely. She’s a writer from Madrid and I recently read her debut novel Bad Habit on Netgalley.*
It’s ruined me. I loved it. Parts of it were nostalgic, this sense of growing up in a time before the rapid gentrification of your neighbourhood.
Part of it was like Pose set in Madrid, fun and girly and sassy with the edge of risk constantly looming overhead.
So much of it felt relatable and familiar for myself, for any queer person, probably any human. The way we hide parts of ourselves to be more palatable. But above all, it also deepened my understanding of what it feels like to be trans. The author writes clearly and without blame, allowing a deep insight into the protagonist’s struggle with her identity and the things she felt she had to put aside to appease the world. And the damage it does to her.
I have to speak about the quality of writing too. I’ve not read characters so vividly and tenderly rendered in a while, the quote below was one of my favourites. And I have to mention the translator, Mara Faye Lethem, too, I haven’t read the Spanish but it feels like she has done an incredible job getting the voice across intact.
“The Wig was super short, thin as a rake, and wrinkled in such a way that as she stirred, she seemed to be interrupting some inexorable mummification. She was always old. She was made up like a caricature of an old lady, with blue eyeshadow, black liner, red lips, and a perfectly cracked foundation of Mona-Lisa-potato-colored skin.”
I genuinely opened the book, read a few pages and had to close it because I was midway through editing my own novel and I knew it distract me and keep me hostage until its end, but also that I’d compare it to my writing and find it lacking, not least because mine is also set in Madrid.
I love Madrid. I lived there for a short while in my 20s and the experience there inspired my first book. I know nothing though. I’m an outsider and it was amazing to get a glimpse of a city I adore, from an insider.
Everyone should read this.
*If you’re a real reader, you need to get your ass on Netgalley - free proofs, reading books early, a treasure trove of new releases. Also helpful if you’re a querying writer and want to know what new books are popping and you can comp your books to.