num_pages: 208
description: Gritty and unflinching yet also tender fantastical and funny a trans womans coming-of-age tale about finding a community among fellow outcasts.Born in the small Argentine town of Mina Clavero Camila is designated male but begins to identify from an early age as a girl. She is well aware that shes different from other children and reacts to her oppressive poverty-stricken home life with a cowed mother and abusive alcoholic father by acting outwith swift consequences. Deeply intelligent she eventually leaves for the city to attend university slipping into prostitution to make ends meet. And in Sarmiento Park in the heart of Crdoba she discovers the strange wonderful world of the trans sex workers who dwell there.Taken under the wing of Auntie Encarna the 178-year-old eternal whose house shelters this unconventional extended family Camila becomes a part of their storiesof a Headless Man who fled his countrys wars a mute young woman who transforms into a bird an abandoned baby boy who brings a twinkle to your eye.Camila Sosa Villadas extraordinary first novel is a rich nuanced portrait of a marginalized community: their romantic relationships friendships and squabbles difficulties at work aspirations and disappointments. It bears witness to these lives constantly haunted by the specter of deathby disease or more violent means at the hands of customers boyfriends or the policeyet full of passion empathy and insight.
language: English
title: Bad Girls
publisher: Other Press