Gritty and unflinching, yet also tender, fantastical, and funny, a trans woman's 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 she's different from other children and reacts to her oppressive, poverty-stricken home life, with a cowed mother and abusive, alcoholic father, by acting out-with 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 Câordoba, 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 stories-of a Headless Man who fled his country's wars, a mute young woman who transforms into a bird, an abandoned baby boy who brings a twinkle to your eye. Camila Sosa Villada's 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 death-by disease or more violent means at the hands of customers, boyfriends, or the police-yet full of passion, empathy, and insight"--
"Beautifully written...a stunning meditation on gender, our bodies, and the ties that bind." --NPR
"A fantastical world that is equal parts violent and tender. In beautifully rendered language, this debut novel...challenges contemporary ideas of gender, sexuality, and love with the magical touch of a fairy tale." -- Wall Street Journal, 10 Best LGBTQ+ Books for Pride Month
"After I finished reading Camila's story, it kept growing in me...As a story of gender oppression, Bad Girls (beautifully translated by Kit Maude) would sound familiar almost everywhere...To record the travesti experience, no matter how harrowingly painful, as something precious is [its] purpose." --Graciela Mochkofsky, The New Yorker
"[Sosa Villada] is a wise, uncommon, and bewitching storyteller." -- Esquire, Must-Read Books by Queer Writers
"This fantastical story about the power of chosen family is entrancing." -- BuzzFeed
"Every so often, a slim book absolutely clobbers you with its exuberance and beauty--for me, this was that book." --Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
"A beautiful novel, moving, disturbing, raw, and honest. In skillfully rendered language, charged with poetic energy, it takes us deep into the world of trans prostitution and explores the violent and tender bonds that unite the women who inhabit it." --Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season
"Remarkable... Bad Girls is a generational testimony as well as a personal one. It imagines a future and exorcises a past, being exceptional for what it promises and for the portrait of a life it leaves behind." -- Astra Magazine
"There's a touch of the miraculous, a sort of stop-motion fabulism, sprouting through the cracks of the Córdoban asphalt in Camila Sosa Villada's Bad Girls, imbuing the novel's ragtag company of trans deities, miscreants, and sex workers with an enduring sense of fantastical improbability...a vivid and boisterous translation...a plaintive vigil that feels like a party." --Justin Walls, Center for the Art of Translation Blog
"[A] poignant trans coming-of-age novel." --Book Riot, Queer Books from Indie Presses You Definitely Don't Want to Miss This Year
"An incredible debut novel...Taking a page from writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Roberto Bolaño, Villada's work blends a stark depiction of violence and trauma with a distinctly queer magical realism." -- Apartment Therapy
"Camila Sosa Villada's Bad Girls blew Argentina's collective mind with its exquisite power, tenderness, and riotous imagination." --Carolina De Robertis, author of The President and the Frog and Cantoras
"This is an important book: fun, tragic, political, and full of marvel. It makes you understand the lives of these women and the wonder and pain of being different and rejected. It's full of pride and exquisitely written. It will break your heart and at the same time make you want to laugh and dance, full of love and sorrow." --Mariana Enríquez, author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
"Confrontational, radical, hopeful, Bad Girls does one of the most important things a book (or a life) can do. It looks at all the rubble and the dirt and asks: 'Can we make anything beautiful from this?'" --Keiran Goddard, author of Hourglass
"An exquisite book full of poetry, warmth, and magical, raw honesty. Gorgeously written stories of lives entwined and enmeshed in the toughest of spaces, stories that felt so bloody generous through the act of sharing. Simply beautiful." --Juno Roche, author of A Working-Class Family Ages Badly
"A work of searing, confrontational beauty." --Juno Mac, coauthor of Revolting Prostitutes
"Without hiding the reality, this novel celebrates trans life with lyricism and wonder. Bad Girls is a gem to be savored." -- Elle (France)
"[Sosa Villada] constructs a language that seems to come from dreams, fairy tales, and adventure novels...a literary sensation." -- Rolling Stone (Argentina)
"From a life reminiscent of a Pedro Almodóvar film, Camila Sosa Villada has drawn a novel, an incredible piece of literature...powerful." -- Vanity Fair (France)
"An homage to sex workers suffused with magic." -- Le Monde
