by Juli Delgado Lopera
Amethyst Editions
3/4/2020, paperback
SKU: 9781936932757
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.
Reviews:
"Fiebre Tropical is a literary explosion. In a rollicking, multilingual prose both wise and irreverent, brimming with snark and queer humor, Juli Delgado Lopera crafts a migration tale we've never read and badly need." --Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms
"Gorgeously written, tragic and hilarious by turns, Fiebre Tropical is the tale of a teenager from Bogotá coming to the United States and coming of age. But more than that, it's about a crumbling family of matriarchs gone crazy for religion, and the soul-saving, soul-crushing power of first love. Juli Delgado Lopera's voice prickles with tears, outrage, and sharp details that make us believe in their characters, and more importantly, to believe in their survival." --Annalee Newitz, author of Autonomous: A Novel
"¡Ay Dios mío! This book's got tumbao. With energetic prose and a sharp sense of humor, Juli Delgado Lopera brings us a queer coming-of-age tale that explores diasporic identity from Bogotá to Miami, and the complicated ways that religious fervor impacts same-sex desire and one's relationship to community. Delgado Lopera's eye for detail is fierce and this book is easy to devour." --Joseph Cassara, author of The House of Impossible Beauties: A Novel
About the Author:
Juli Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer and historian based in San Francisco. Delgado Lopera is the author of Quiéreme (Nomadic Press 2017) and the illustrated, bilingual oral history collection ¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute Books 2017), which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award. They are the recipient of the 2014 Jackson Literary Award, and has received fellowships from the Brush Creek Foundation of the Arts, Lambda Literary Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The SF Grotto, and an individual artist grant from the SF Arts Commission. Their work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Eleven Eleven, Foglifter, Four Way Review, Broadly, and TimeOut Mag, among others. Delgado Lopera is formerly the creative director of RADAR Productions, a queer literary nonprofit in San Francisco.