This Is the Year

Written in a hybrid of prose and verse, this spare and lyrical YA cli-fi imagines a climate-ravaged future through the eyes of a teen girl torn between the urge to fight for a better world and the impulse to run away.

This is the year. Yes, Ofe, on this gloomy first day of my last year of high school, I swear before your grave, Hermana, this is the year I am getting out of here.

So swears Julieta Villareal, a seventeen-year-old wannabe writer whose twin sister died in a hit-and-run a few months ago. Juli’s Florida home is crumbling in the face of climate disaster, and with Ofelia gone, Juli can’t stand to stay any longer in a place that doesn’t seem to have room for her. She’s not sure how she’s going to do it—everyone knows brown-skinned, poverty-stricken New Americans like Juli have no options—but she’s getting out.

Then, Juli is recruited by the Cometa Initiative, a private space program enlisting high-aptitude New American teens for a high-stakes mission to establish a human sanctuary on the Moon. 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 and fresh love, and against all odds, Juli begins to find hope where she was sure there wasn’t any. As her world collapses from the ramifications—both environmental and social—of the climate crisis, Juli must decide if she’ll carry her loss together with her community or leave it all behind.

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

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