Fiebre Tropical - Wyrms.de

Paperback, 240 pages

Published March 4, 2020 by Amethyst Editions.

ISBN:: 978-1-936932-75-7

(1 review)

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.

2 editions

Robert Fromont reviewed Fiebre Tropical by Juli Delgado Lopera

Come for the Spanglish, stay for the teenage lesbian immigrant angst.

5 stars

This is a vivid, stifling tail of first love and heartbreak, written in the Spanglish of Francisca, a not-so-sweet sixteen fresh of the plane in Miami, dragged with her sister to the promised land of Yanquilandia from Colombia by her controlling, born-again-christian mother, where they live in a small apartment with with her drunkard abuela.

Sucked into the world of the local evanglical church against her will, she falls for the pastors' adopted daughter, Carmen. She 'accepts Jesus into her heart' in order to be with her crush, and finally there's a source of joy in her existence, where she's otherwise an outsider at all turns.

Along the way we learn of past quinceañera vidas of the matriarchs of Francesca's family; her abuela, the most eligible costeña bachorette who wanted to have nothing to do with any of her suitors, much to her father's consternation, and her mother, the capitalist-schoolgirl …

This is a vivid, stifling tail of first love and heartbreak, written in the Spanglish of Francisca, a not-so-sweet sixteen fresh of the plane in Miami, dragged with her sister to the promised land of Yanquilandia from Colombia by her controlling, born-again-christian mother, where they live in a small apartment with with her drunkard abuela.

Sucked into the world of the local evanglical church against her will, she falls for the pastors' adopted daughter, Carmen. She 'accepts Jesus into her heart' in order to be with her crush, and finally there's a source of joy in her existence, where she's otherwise an outsider at all turns.

Along the way we learn of past quinceañera vidas of the matriarchs of Francesca's family; her abuela, the most eligible costeña bachorette who wanted to have nothing to do with any of her suitors, much to her father's consternation, and her mother, the capitalist-schoolgirl taking advantage of the artesanas indíginas to make a profit from her private-school classmates, and running away from home, and falling into a life of drugs and sex.

The writing is so compelling you can taste the sweat, feel the weight of the heat and the oppression of her family life.