By Georgia Jackson, College of Arts and Sciences
In Gloria Muñoz's debut novel, a genre-bending work of young adult climate fiction, Florida is crumbling under the weight of climate disaster, and seventeen-year-old Julieta Villarreal must decide whether to remain on Earth with her friends and family or to leave everything behind and embark on a mission to establish humanityâs first extraterrestrial settlement.
The bookâs prescient nature came as a surprise even to Muñoz, who began writing âThis is the Year" in 2020 when her life was turned upside down during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A new mother, business owner and teacher at the time, Muñoz started spending a lot of time with her young daughter at a park near their home in St. Petersburg, Fla.
âI would stare across the water at these houses that were built right on the seawall,â said Muñoz, who studied poetry in the creative writing program at USF and has served as poet laureate of St. Petersburg since 2022. âAnd I just started imagining what they would look like in 50 years, 100 years, 300 years, 400 years."
"This is the Year" is out now from Holiday House Books.
The prospect of rising sea levels made Muñoz think of her daughter who was often sleeping in her stroller during these pensive moments.
âI was looking at these houses and thinking of her future and the world that we're leaving behind and building and changing with all every decision we make,â she said.
"This is the Yearâ is set in a Florida of the near future, where temperatures reach 105 degrees on Christmas Eve. Those who can, live in a walled, inner-city neighborhood safe from flooding and guarded by armed AI security. Those who canât, live on the coast and in flood zones.
At one point, a building in Julietaâs neighborhood collapses:
All the air leaves my body. Itâs the Heron. Yes, the place with the pool weâd sneak into during hot summers. âThere are four fatalities and counting,â the reporter says, looking somewhere past the camera. âMany are injured. Many are still lost.â This is the term the news uses: many. The people in our neighborhood are the unnamed who have been pushed to the edge of land. Here, many buildings donât have standard inspections. Many homes are hand-me-downs, cut and rigged into tiny apartments. The waterfront was never supposed to be ours.
When Champlain Towers South, a 12-story beachfront condominium in Surfside, Fla., partially collapsed in 2021, Muñoz wondered if she should remove the scene from her draft.
âI didnât want it to seem like I was being opportunistic â even though I had written the scene before the collapse,â said Muñoz, who quickly realized other events in the novel would likely play out in big and small ways before its publication date. âIf we started taking things out, it would have become a fundamentally different story.â
Another element from Julietaâs world recently leapt off the page and into .
âItâs a great piece of local news. The article is so well done,â said Muñoz, who wrote the herbivorous mammal into extinction in her novel. âThe manatee, which has no known predator, going extinct is truly a stain on our human history â if we were to let that happen. Because we are the predator in that scenario."
In âThis is the Year,â Julieta remembers the manatee. She saw one at the beach, once, before they went extinct. The memory reminds her of her twin sister Ofelia, who was killed in a hit-and-run a year before the events of the novel take place.
âThat day existed,â Julieta says, referring to the time she spotted a manatee grazing on seaweed. âManatees existed. You existed.â
For all of its melancholy, âThis is the Year" is a missive of hope.
âIt's so easy to feel helpless right now,â said Muñoz, who experienced the feeling while drafting the novel. âIt felt like anything you might do wouldnât move the needle or like a drop in an infinite ocean of sorrow. And I really wanted it to feel like, no, actually, there are small and big ways that we can do things together and make a difference.â
The novel is a blend of both. Despair and hope. Poetry and prose. English and Spanish. Julieta and her twin sister Ofelia â whom she mourns and addresses throughout the novel.
âI really like the advice the faculty gave us to work outside of our genre,â Muñoz said of the time she spent as a graduate student the USF Department of English. âTo just take the class, try something out, collaborate, experiment outside of the one specific genre that you think is where you fit. That was helpful for me as someone who was interested in translation and wanting to try out creative nonfiction, fiction and screen writing. I think it helped me a lot in the long run to see that writing can take many forms.â
"This is the Yearâ is out now from . Signed copies are available at Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, where Muñoz will host , a live reading featuring local poets, on Wednesday, April 30.
The audiobook will be available on May 13.