What Climate Fiction Can Teach Us About Hope, a guest post by Gloria Muñoz

This fall, my city was affected by two back-to-back hurricanes. I live in a Southern coastal region where every hurricane and record-breaking heat wave push us closer to the undeniable urgency of climate change and to the irreversible long-term effects of sea-level rise in coastal regions. Each day a different species inches closer towards extinction. The fires, the floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes—all have somehow become staples in the headlines. I want my debut novel, This Is the Year, to remain fiction, but like science fiction, climate fiction can feel prophetic, if not cautionary. Climate narratives are a part of our zeitgeist. And to put it plainly, climate change is overwhelming. But we depend on the health of our planet, so there is no looking away. This Is the Year is a hybrid cli-fi (climate fiction) novel that considers how we hold onto hope in the face of the climate crisis. When writing this This Is the Year, I knew I’d have to strike a balance between the bleak and difficult realities of the climate crisis nature and the community building, levity, and even humor that intersect our lives during challenging times.

This is not an easy task. But YA fiction—which is typically about navigating internal and external challenges with the help of friends and community—is the perfect place to carry a dialogue about climate change. Teens today were born into a mess, but they are also some of the most outspoken, creative, and innovative minds we have today. I wrote This Is the Year for Young Adults because I believe that young people have the capacity, prudence, and hope to enact change.

Teenagers will continue to be teenagers even when the world feels like it’s ending. The characters were developed with this in mind. They have their own passions and frustrations. Juli and Jeanine, her nemesis turned good friend, are forced to make up an intimidating amount of volunteer hours are faced with the grim impacts of climate change as they clean beaches and help track shorebirds. The unlikely friends, find a common ground for dialogue through roller skating. Mari, resident theater kid, imagines the future through plays and in the planning and décor of a school dance. Roger, who plays the cello and lives with his Sony’s on his head, finds and helps care for a bird that crashed into a building’s window. From my lived experience and in my research for This Is the Year, I have found that issues of climate change are often interlaced with the everyday. While each character is affected by the repercussions of climate change in some way, they all have big dreams and hopes for their futures as well. On the brink of graduation, they have the rest of their lives ahead of them if and only if they can take action and imagine a different world.

In This Is the Year, as in our reality, high rises and developers continue to buy land and disenfranchise and displace communities. This discord has become more prevalent in the shadow of the pandemic. As Penn State meteorologist Gregory Jenkins told The Washington Post “Racism is ‘inexorably’ linked to climate change because it dictates who benefits from activities that produce planet-warming gases and who suffer most from the consequences.” While people of color are disproportionately more affected by the ramifications of climate change, their voices and concerns are not always at the forefront of these policy-making conversations. What can we do when profit is put before people? At its core, This Is the Year asks, “What voices are not invited to the table when we build future cities?” And “How have immigrants been writing environmental futures all along?” I hope my work helps expand the dialogue of cli-fi with an eye for inclusivity.

As a novelist, poet, translator, and daughter of Colombian immigrants, I’m particularly motivated to highlight migrant, undocumented, first generation, Southern narratives. This Is the Year engages with how people relate to ever-shifting environments and imagine futures in the wake of this human-caused ecological crisis. I hope the novel, which combines forms (prose and verse), exists beyond its published form to spark ideas in classrooms and communities, and serves as a roadmap for how to hold onto joy and hope in the face of oppression, grief, and environmental loss.

After a hurricane, destruction and beauty coexist. People’s lives are turned upside down, homes are damaged, trees fallen, nothing looks the same. In that same aftermath, people show up for one another in big and small ways. Neighbors help clear our homes, cut tree branches, feed one another. A very large oak tree fell on my home during hurricane Milton. We had a mountain of debris outside of our home for months. Kids in the neighborhood drew smiley faces on the rounds of cut trees. This small gesture made staring at the destruction a little less devastating. On our walks around the neighborhood, we found smiley faces spraypaintd on  nearly every pile of debris. Hope finds its way back into our lives even, and perhaps especially, in the dark times.

The characters in the novel show up for each other repeatedly. Even when Juli, who is struggling with personal grief, tries to push everyone away. This Is the Year is a book that asks hard questions and invites readers to be open to using their wit, creativity, and hope to help the main character Juli make sense of the world. We need young adult fiction that makes room for the grief and hope of the climate crisis. These works will be the guides that help teach us how to observe, reach forward, traverse new borders, and, perhaps more poignantly, how revel in and show up for the people, animals, and places we love.

Meet the author

Gloria Muñoz is a Colombian American writer and advocate for multilingual literacy who enjoys writing about plants, migrations, star stuff, and the environments that shape us. She is the author of the poetry collections Your Biome Has Found You and Danzirly, which won the Ambroggio Prize and the Florida Gold Medal Book Award for Poetry. She is an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow, a Hedgebrook Fellow, a Macondista, a member of Las Musas, and a Highlights Foundation Diverse Verse Fellow. This Is the Year, her debut novel, is now available for pre-order. Visit Gloria on social media at @bygloriamunoz and on her website at gloriamunoz.com.

About This Is the Year

This dazzling YA cli-fi written in prose and verse will speak to any reader struggling with the state of our world and how to understand their place in it.

“In outer space, no one will know me as the girl with the dead sister.”

Seventeen-year-old self-proclaimed Goth and aspiring writer Julieta Villarreal is drowning. She’s grieving her twin sister who died in a hit-and-run, her Florida home is crumbling under the weight of climate disaster, and she isn’t sure how much longer she can stand to stay in a place that doesn’t seem to have room for her. 

Then, Juli is recruited by Cometa, a private space program enlisting high-aptitude New American teens for a high-stakes mission to establish humanity’s first extraterrestrial settlement. Cometa pitches this as an opportunity for Juli to give back to her adopted country; Juli sees it as her only chance to do something big with her life. 

Juli begins her training, convinced Cometa is her path to freedom. But her senior year is full of surprises, including new friendships, roller skating, and first love. And through her small but poignant acts of environmentalism, Juli begins to find hope in unexpected places. As her world collapses from the ramifications of the climate crisis, Juli must decide if she’ll carry her loss together with her community or leave it all behind.

Told in gripping prose interspersed with poems from Juli’s writing journal, this genre-bending novel explores themes of immigration, climate justice, grief, and the power of communities.

ISBN-13: 9780823458363
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Publication date: 01/07/2025
Age Range: 14 – 17 Years

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