Fiebre Tropical

Starred review from December 9, 2019
Lopera’s moving and hilarious debut novel (after the essay collection Quiéreme)
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 Bogotá, 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.

Starred review from January 15, 2020
In U.S.-based Colombian author Delgado Lopera's coming-of-age novel, a 15-year-old Colombian girl struggles with her identity and her burgeoning sexuality. Dragged unwillingly from Bogot� to Miami, crammed with her mother and sister into her grandmother's apartment at the Heather Glen Apartment Complex, Francisca misses her friends and her former life. But she can't go home, because "this wasn't a Choose Your Own Migration multiple-choice adventure." In a scene early in the book, her mother insists on baptizing a child she miscarried 17 years before, using a plastic doll from a discount store as a stand-in baby. Manic one moment and sad the next, Mami has joined the Iglesia Cristiana Jesucristo Redentor, an evangelical Colombian church in "a stinky room in the Hyatt Hotel nobody cared to vacuum." In the car on their way there, the doll stares at Francisca with a fixed, plastic smile. "Are you happy now, asshole, I wanted to say....You're still dead, pendejo." With a whip-smart, unapologetic voice peppered with Colombian slang, Francisca pulls us into her new life in "Yanquilandia." Trouble arises when she meets Carmen the pastor's daughter, who wants her to accept Jesus into her heart. Francisca imagines God in "a dentist's waiting room checking in with the receptionist every so often, Did Francisca receive my son in her heart yet? (said no God ever)." Instead, she finds herself falling in love with Carmen, threatening her family's tenuous place in the immigrant community. Though the plot revolves around a coming-out story, the great strength of Delgado Lopera's writing lies in its layered portrayals of these characters and their world. "Women in my family possessed a sixth sense...from the close policing of our sadness: Your tristeza wasn't yours, it was part of the larger collective female sadness jar to which we all contributed." A rich, deeply felt novel about family ties, immigration, sexual longing, faith, and desire. Simultaneously raw and luminous.

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February 1, 2020
Tropical fever, indeed! Award-winning Lopera presents a new and uniquely charming voice in this stream-of-consciousness novel. Feisty Francisca is a lonely teenager who flails and rails against the fate that has brought her to the low-rent, ant-infested townhouses of Miami with an obsessed mother, annoying little sister, and demented grandmother, a brutal comedown from her privileged life in Bogot�. The friends she left behind have slowly grown distant and she is forced to attend her mother's evangelist Church of Jesus el Redentor, where she improbably falls in love with Carmen, the pastor's gutsy daughter. As she narrates the story of her desperation and her awakening, Francisca's voice is engaging and lyrical, effortlessly code-switching from English to Spanish in a completely natural way?often within the same sentence. Lopera's internalized tale explores the complications of family, immigration, faith, and taboo love with fresh and compelling directness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)