In ‘Fiebre Tropical,’ a Colombian Teenager Moves to Miami and Comes of Age

Books of The Times When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. The travel writer Paul Theroux once called Miami one of the most overrated places he’d been. “It’s a swamp on a beach,” he said, “and has terrible feng shui. ” For the immigrant family from Colombia in “Fiebre Tropical,” Juli Delgado Lopera’s boldly colored first novel — the prose is as ebullient and assertive as Rosie Perez’s shadowboxing in the opening credits of “Do the Right Thing” — Miami was a travel poster, a dream destination.

In reality, it’s been one disappointment after the next. “Where was the Miami life we all dreamed about from those Marc Anthony music videos? ” asks Lopera’s narrator, Francisca. She’s 15, bilingual, God-bothered and sexually confused.

“Where was our South Beach and our Versace and our long shiny hair unbothered by the humidity and our larger-than-life apartment overlooking the playa? Where was that feeling of grandiosity and fullness? Where was that sense of superiority that we’d briefly felt the moment we told everyone in Bogotá we were moving to the United States — uyyy a los Mayamis — and amid the tears, the feeling of reverence? Cachaco, perdio.

Nowhere to be seen. ” Francisca’s family, three generations, is crowded into her grandmother’s ant-infested apartment, which has a sweeping view over a dumpster. At the Heather Glen Apartment Complex, Francisca says, “there was a moldy Jacuzzi and a small pool where dead insects, used condoms, and mutant ducks with red lumps on their beaks congregated and left trails of green poop. ” Francisca senses she’s different from the other women in her family.

There exists in her what Vivian Gornick has called “the gene for anarchy, alive in everyone born into the wrong class, the wrong color, the wrong sex. ” So far she’s channeled her dissatisfaction by ticking boxes on the teenage-misfit checklist: a taste for Sylvia Plath; a love of the Velvet Underground; the wearing of a lot of black. There’s a bit of the cynic, of Holden Caulfield, in Francisca. But that’s not entirely why she’s interesting.

She’s interesting because Lopera puts her to such good use as an observer. She’s wide-awake. She may be quiet and a girl of slender means but, internally, she’s a kibitzer.