An important book: fun, tragic, political and full of marvel ... It will break your heart and at the same time make you want to laugh and dance Stunning... Beautiful and devastating in equal measure, this had me reading right through the night to see how the story ends

Oh, to truly know fear you need to be a travesti carrying a blood-soaked baby newborn in a purse.’ (p6) The novel is mainly set in 2002 and it is narrated by the author and protagonist. The stories are about the difficulties that she encountered during her entire life as a transgender woman, but they are also about the lives of the group of sex workers (mostly fellow trans women) that she meets at Sarmiento Park. In beautifully rendered language, this debut novel from Argentine actor and writer Sosa Villada challenges contemporary ideas of gender, sexuality and love with the magical touch of a fairy tale. Las Malas has several elements of magical realism since it depicts a realistic view of the modern world with the incorporation of magical elements[11] that deal with intended blurred lines between fantasy and reality. Las Malas describes the oddities and the dreary realities trans people usually go through together with supernatural phenomena presented as fairy-tale-like segments disruptively. This amalgamation of real and magical elements elevates the tone while being informative and rough in content. The author describes the transformation of two characters into animals, a wolf and a bird and she includes fantastic characters, such as men without heads. Maria, una mujer muda que se vuelve pájaro. Natalí, la séptima hija nacida varón, que en las noches de luna llena se convierte en lobo. La Machi, una curandera que sana con magia oriunda de Brasil. Los hombres decapitados, hombres que perdieron su cabeza en guerras y ahora piensan con el cuerpo y la tía Encarna, encarnando la madre de todos estos seres míticos.A beautiful novel, moving, disturbing, raw and honest ' Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season Sosa Villada’s storytelling is guttural, tender, humorous and punk … an aesthetic that drips with the oral rhythms swept up from the dark streets of Cordoba into perfect streams of poetic prose’ Julian Delgado Lopera

A beautifully written and expertly translated work of autofiction ... Sosa Villada's tales of headless horsemen and women who turn into birds are a stunning meditation on gender, our bodies and the ties that bind Sarmiento Park is as an actual park in Argentina. In this work the author often refers to her characters by the Latin American term travesti, referring to the word ‘transgender’ as a construct of Northern academia. Travesti, she states in the author notes at the beginning, is an ancient word that speaks more honestly of how transgender people are viewed by society generally and one, though an insult, Latin American travesti claim as their own. A beautiful novel, moving, disturbing, raw and honest’ Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season The book has been a critical and commercial success. [5] It has been translated into French, German and Croatian, and will also be released in Italian, Norwegian and Brazilian Portuguese during 2021. [6] In February 2021, it was announced that the English-language translation was in the making and would be published by Other Press under the title The Queens of Sarmiento Park. [6] It’s also deeply challenging and devastating, and the book left me sad for a while, a story which punched me with its duality of fierce hope and desperate circumstance, a story of reality wrapped up safe to keep it alive. Safe on it’s own terms. Safe for a moment.Es a pura fuerza de lenguaje que lo que sería la sucesión de aventuras marginales de un grupo de transexuales argentinas se convierte en la posibilidad de leernos otras dentro de sus cuerpos, dentro de su miedo, dentro de su éxtasis. Es a pura fuerza de lenguaje que consigue hibridar una literatura comprometida, claramente panfletaria en momentos, con la poética suelta, altamente simbólica, de mujeres-pájaro y mujeres-lobo que alcanzan a deslizarse como fantasmas entre el desarrollo de la trama. Garras de oro y magia antigua para apaciguar los espíritus de la muerte. Palabras, palabras que consiguen sobornar los barcos del olvido para fundar puertos de fantasía donde la realidad obliga a punta de tormentas la existencia exclusiva del descampado. A beautiful novel, moving, disturbing, raw and honest‘ Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season The third theme is the subject of prostitution itself. This includes what it is to live fully as both prostitute and specifically as transgender. Woven into these sections are details about the double standards transgender prostitutes encounter in their work through the type of clients they meet, and the violence they regularly encounter from the public and the police. Gómez, Andrés (March 13, 2021). "Camila Sosa: "El feminismo hoy también es un espacio de poder" ". La Tercera (in Spanish) . Retrieved June 14, 2021. E tutto quel loro vendersi e svendersi, altro non era che una richiesta disperata di amore: “Si trattava di mendicare amore, quel mostro spaventoso. Tutto si riduceva, in fondo, alla febbre dell’amore. Chiedere amore, supplicarlo in mille modi, con i trucchetti più egoisti e più falsi che si potessero concepire, valeva tutto. Eppure noi restammo comunque al suo fianco. Quando una porta si chiude, si apre una finestra, ma occorre essere molto agili per entrare o uscire dalla finestra.”