Fiebre Tropical
A Novel
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3.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Winner for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction
Winner of the 2021 Ferro-Grumley Literary Award for LGBTQ Fiction
Finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Fiction
Lit by the hormonal neon glow of Miami, this debut novel follows a Colombian teenager's coming-of-age as she plunges headfirst into lust and evangelism.
Uprooted from her comfortable life in Bogotá, Colombia, into an ant-infested Miami townhouse, fifteen-year-old Francisca is miserable and friendless in her strange new city. Her alienation grows when her mother is swept up into an evangelical church, replete with Christian salsa, abstinent young dancers, and baptisms for the dead.
But there, Francisca also meets the magnetic Carmen: opinionated and charismatic, head of the youth group, and the pastor’s daughter. As her mother’s mental health deteriorates and her grandmother descends into alcoholism, Francisca falls more and more intensely in love with Carmen. To get closer to her, Francisca turns to Jesus to be saved, even as their relationship hurtles toward a shattering conclusion.
“Ebullient and assertive.” —New York Times
"Julián Delgado Lopera—remember that name—is an irreverent, shameless and disarming new novelist. They are a merciless satirist in control of a pitch-perfect voice that makes an indisputable case for Spanglish as the perfect vehicle to express what we are really like right now." —NBC News
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lopera's moving and hilarious debut novel (after the essay collection Qui reme) switches seamlessly between Spanish and English as it follows a 15-year-old Colombian girl who moves to Miami and becomes swept up in a church and with the pastor's beautiful daughter. Francisca, whose mother brought them to the U.S. for economic opportunity, is skeptical of religion and would rather be back in Bogot , smoking cigarettes and reading Sylvia Plath, than join the youth group at church or indulge her mother's obsession with baptizing her dead infant brother, gone before Francisca was even born. As Francisca's mother becomes more involved with the local Christian congregation, Carmen, the pastor's daughter, decides to take on Francisca as her personal salvation project, bringing her along to hand out fliers and evangelize in neighboring communities. The more time the girls spend together, the more Francisca realizes that her feelings for Carmen are not strictly platonic. Along with understanding her burgeoning sexuality, Francisca must also deal with her mother's increasingly tenuous grip on reality and the process of assimilating into her new home and culture. Lopera convincingly renders Francisca's adolescent insecurities and awkward obsessions, and the spirited bilingual prose ("Immigrant criolla here reporting desade Los Mayamis from our ant-infested townhouse") will engage readers. This feisty coming-of-age tale introduces a funny, fresh, and indelible new voice.
