Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2020
240 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Uprooted from Bogotá into an ant-infested Miami townhouse, fifteen-year-old Francisca is miserable in her strange new city.
Her alienation grows when her mother is swept up in an evangelical church, replete with abstinent salsa dancers and baptisms for the dead. But there, Francisca meets the magnetic Carmen: head of the youth group and the pastor's daughter. As her mother's mental health deteriorates, Francisca falls for Carmen and is saved to grow closer with her, even as their relationship hurtles toward a shattering conclusion.
"Lopera convincingly renders Francisca's adolescent insecurities and awkward obsessions, and the spirited bilingual prose will engage readers. This feisty coming-of-age tale introduces a funny, fresh, and indelible new voice." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A rich, deeply felt novel about family ties, immigration, sexual longing, faith, and desire. Simultaneously raw and luminous." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Engaging and lyrical." - Booklist
"A layered portrait of exile, sexual awakening, and family bonds." - The Millions
"Glowing....a story about coming of age as a queer adolescent, an immigrant, a daughter, a bilingual kid, a complex human being, this book is fast-paced and energetic while also being heartfelt and captivating." - LitHub
"A magnificent novel, by turns electric, hilarious, sexy, thrilling, wrenching, and profound. Pa decirlo clarito: Juliana Delgado Lopera is a writer of explosive talent, and this book is a fierce and radiant contribution, yes, to queer literature, Latinx literature, and immigrant literature, but also to literature, punto." - Carolina De Robertis, author of Cantoras
"Juliana Delgado Lopera's riveting new book is propelled as much by its hurricane-force language as by its unforgettable characters, storm-tossed women making the best of their new lives in a new country. This queer coming-of-age novel explores first love, but it also looks at the myriad ways humans find solace and connection." - Caroline Paul, author of You Are Mighty: A Guide to Changing the World
"Fiebre Tropical is a literary explosion filled with sweaty Jesus-crazed teens, fainting churchgoers, powerful, melodramatic mothers, and drunken grandmothers. In a rollicking, multilingual prose both wise and irreverent, brimming with snark and queer humor, Juliana Delgado Lopez crafts a migration tale we've never read and badly need." - Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms
This information about Fiebre Tropical was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Juliana Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer and historian based in San Francisco. She 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. She is 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. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Eleven Eleven, Foglifter, Four Way Review, Broadly, and TimeOut Magazine, among others. She is formerly the creative director of RADAR Productions, a queer literary nonprofit in San Francisco.
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