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March 1, 2022
They call themselves "Travesti," rejecting the term transgender women. They are sex workers, the "bad girls" of the title. Set in Cordoba, Argentina, this is their story. It begins when Auntie Incarna finds an abandoned baby in the park where the Travesti ply their trade. She and her Travesti cohort take the baby to Auntie's home, the queerest boarding house in the world, where many of the women live as a family. The story of their lives is told by Camila, the youngest of the Travesti, who also tells about her terrible childhood, living, impoverished, with her uncaring mother and violently alcoholic father. While not losing sight of Auntie and the baby, she writes, too, of her own often-squalid adult life and of the experiences she has in a dangerous profession. The vividly realized book incorporates elements of magic realism: Auntie is 178 years old, for example, and one of the women transforms into a bird; another is a werewolf. Magic or not, it is an almost unbearably sad story, the saddest part of which, as Camila concludes, is that love never came.
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March 21, 2022
Argentine actor and writer Villada debuts with a mystical if diffuse portrayal of travesti (trans women) sex workers in Córdoba, Argentina. Camila, 21, attends college by day and at night joins a group of tight-knit travestis in Sarmiento Park, servicing johns from all walks of life. After Auntie Encarna, the group’s 178-year-old leader, finds an infant boy in a park ditch, she gets the other women to help her care for him. The novel is grounded by Camila and Auntie Encarna, but each chapter introduces new travestis. There is Deaf and mute Maria, who slowly turns into a bird, and La Machi, their medicine woman whose gravitas makes her an authority figure, among others. These portraits enrich a series of painful stories about the violence in the women’s lives and point to a central tension, that travestis are both desired and despised by the world (“to punish us they say no one will want us. But life couldn’t go on without us there,” Camila narrates). While the chronicle finds strengths in its convincing characters, driven by sympathetic Camila, the disparate portraits and episodes don’t all hang together. Still, Villada makes this thoroughly heartbreaking.
December 9, 2022
DEBUT In 1990s C�rdoba, Argentina, a group of trans sex workers are doing their nightly rounds in Sarmiento Park when 178-year-old leader Auntie Encarna discovers a barely alive baby boy and persuades the others to take him in. Soon, he's a part of the vibrant surrogate family gathering at Auntie's Pink House. Through deft portraiture, family member Camila conveys the story of this tough, tightly bound group in language at once grittily realistic, lushly fantastical, and entirely moving. There's a Deaf and mute woman, who's gradually becoming a bird; an authoritative healer; the remarkable Auntie Ecarna; the Headless Man, a refugee from war and her one true love; and Camila herself, the anchor of the narrative, who's a college student by day after having escaped an abusive family and her hometown's driving poverty. Jointly, their lives tell the story of violence against trans women. VERDICT A startling first novel, winner of the Premio Sor Juana In�s de la Cruz; Villada is a transgender Argentine actress and writer. --Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
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