Duende

by Alex Poppe

Sixteen-year-old Lava lives peacefully enough with her imperfect mother, Lila, and their boarder, Cody, an Iraqi war vet suffering from PTSD. Lava's ex-addict father, Jesse, is released from prison, and Lava's life in Detroit is upended when Jesse pressures Lava for her urine so he can pass his mandatory drug tests. After an altercation, Lava is sent to live with her mother's cousin Lola in Seville. Lola is a larger-than-life flamenco dancer who teaches Lava the language of flamenco dance; Lava's life opens outward as she becomes fluent in flamenco's structure, giving her new modes of expression as she experiences first love, friendship, and betrayal, and uncovers family secrets. Rich with lyrical, sensual prose, Duende is a coming-of-age novella about mothers and daughters, about legacy, about self-expression, about defining a way to live.

137 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 14, 2022

About the author

Living in that liminal space between theoretical and actual equality, Alex observes how violence reverberates across a life, fascinated by the human capacity for joy, wonder, and resilience, all of it shaping how people become who they are.

Alex Poppe is the author of four works of literary fiction: Duende by Regal House Publishing (2022), Jinwar and Other Stories by Cune Press (2022), Moxie by Tortoise Books (2019), and Girl, World by Laughing Fire Press (2017). Duende won the 2024 American Legacy Book Awards in the novella category, the 2023 International Book Awards in the novella category, and was a 2023 Spring Readers’ Choice Book Awards finalist. Jinwar and Other Stories won the 2023 Spring Readers’ Choice Book Award in the adult book category and was a 2022 International Book Awards finalist. In 2018, Girl, World was named a 35 Over 35 Debut Book Award winner, First Horizon Award finalist, Montaigne Medal finalist, Eric Hoffer Grand Prize finalist, and was awarded an Honorable Mention in General Fiction from the Eric Hoffer Awards. Her short fiction and nonfiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and commended for the Baker Prize among others. In 2021, Alex was an artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where Breakfast Wine began.

Reviews

[John Julius · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alex Poppe is clearly a gifted sentence writer. There are some gorgeous lines in this short book, but there are also many labored, overwritten ones, in my opinion. She writes with great passion about flamenco and Seville. Those sections seem truly lived. There are occasional mistakes in her Spanish, for example in one key line: “Juega para mi, Papá,” she has native-speaking Lola say to her guitar-playing father, when it should be “Toca para mí, papá.” (Play for me, Papa.) I’d say this book is for readers who prefer to get lost in language rather than story. I like my novels the other way around, so to me the prose seemed overdone and the story underdone. That said, there are narrative surprises in DUENDE, and some deft and striking scenes—like when Lava, the sixteen-year-old narrator and protagonist, loses her virginity. The book starts and finishes strong. In many ways, it read like an uncensored, tell-it-like-it-is young adult novel, although I don’t think readers need to be a certain age to enjoy it.