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.
We are kicking off 2025 in the best way with the book launch celebration of Gloria Muñoz’s debut YA novel, This is the Year! Muñoz and Carmen Alvarez open our event season in the courtyard talking about this gorgeous, poetic novel!
This is the Year is now available for preorder, and readers who order their copy from Tombolo Books will also get the special book-themed swag included with their purchase!
More about This is the Year:
“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.
Gloria Muñoz is the author of 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 Highlights Foundation Diverse Verse Fellow, and a part of Las Musas. This Is the Year is her debut novel. Visit her online at gloriamunoz.com and on Instagram at @bygloriamunoz.
Carmen Alvarez of TomesAndTextiles is a Cuban-American residing in Florida. Outside of her passion for books and undying love of my local library, she adores vintage fashion, music, film, supporting the local arts and her 2 dogs. She’s weirdly obsessed with skincare and will have a sheet mask recommendation for you at the drop of a hat.