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Trash by Sylvia Aguilar-Zéleny
4.0
emotional reflective sad fast-paced

I was so immersed in this book that I didn't even stop reading to write notes for my review - which is very annoying for present me two months later. However, I do remember being completely sucked in by these three alternating narratives, featuring three different women all with links to a rubbish dump in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. There's a young girl who's abandoned by her mother and her boyfriend forced to survive on her own living in the dump. There's a doctor conducting social research about the folks who live at the dump. Finally there's Reyna, a trans sex worker who is probably the driving force of the narrative. Her sections are narrated using a forceful second person, and at times you feel like she's reaching through the pages and shaking you by the shoulders. She constantly laments and mourns the trans sisters she has lost to transphobia and femicide, taking on a decidedly tough-love guardian angel role. 

Genuinely such an original and fascinating story, I might read it again at some point.
Translated from the Spanish by J.D. Pluecker (with a fantastic translator's note).

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