Author Maria Ingrande Mora imagines a dystopian future for Young Adult readers

Before she became a writer, Maria Ingrande Mora was a reader. With a huge appetite for books.

“I read everything I could get my hands on,” the fourth-generation St. Petersburg native explains. “It was a big joke in my family that I destroyed a lot of paperbacks by dropping them in the bathtub, or dropping them in the pool. I always had a book in my hand at the dinner table, in the car, everywhere.

“In middle school, when I wore braces, my reward for getting them tightened was to go to Haslam’s and buy a book.”

Mora’s on the other side of the literary aisle now, as Flux is publishing Fragile Remedy, her first book, Tuesday.

Fragile Remedy is young adult fiction, set in a dystopian future where 16-year-old Nate lives as a refugee in the slums of a ruined city, the scarred neighborhoods separated by canals of toxic sludge.

He is a GEM (Genetically-Engineered Medi-Tissue), created as sort of living organ bank for the wealthy, who will eventually put his body and blood to good use.

Mora describes herself as a “child of the ‘80s,” a period when science fiction film and television were at their dystopian zenith (think Blade Runner, The Terminator, Escape From New York, RoboCop).

“I really love high-stakes stories,” she admits. “And I think that when you have a setting that is dangerous by nature, it’s easy for the stakes to kind of be present at all times.

“Even if the narrative itself maybe isn’t as high-stakes – I tend to write a quieter narrative, in terms of, it’s more about internal stakes and internal growth than, say, saving the world.”

A longtime content strategist and designer, Mora recently opened her own marketing firm, Mora Creative Strategy.

It was the constant deadline-pressure of writing copy, she says, that made her realize she probably had a full-length book in her, somewhere, after years of self-doubt.

“I always considered myself a very short-form writer. So for a long time, the idea of writing something long just sounded difficult to achieve. I would tell myself ‘Oh, I have a lot of stories, but none of them matter, and I wouldn’t have the attention span, and it’s too long …’

“It took me about a decade of just writing for fun, writing for play, to realize that I could give it a try.”

She earned a degree in English from the University of Florida. “I had a fantastic professor, Dr. Kenneth Kidd, and I took Young Adult Lit classes with him,” Mora explains. “It really broadened my perspective in terms of the importance of young adult literature. I always knew I wanted to write YA.

“I took a Queer Literature class with him, and realizing that that was a niche audience that was fairly underserved, especially a decade ago, it just felt like a way I wanted to be able to connect with teens.”

Several of the characters in Fragile Remedy, including the protagonist Nate, are gay.

“I’m a queer woman, and growing up as a voracious reader I definitely did not read very many queer characters on the page,” says Mora. “And so a lot of times, it was reading something and then daydreaming, what if these characters had been a same-sex couple? I would have related to it more.”

Although there exists a “huge spectrum of what I would consider to be queer fiction, from adult literature to young adult literature,” she adds, the majority are “quite heavy, stories of coming out, stories of homophobia, stories of dark things happening.

“It was important for me, for this book, that there’s no angst about being gay. The characters that are gay are experiencing an adventure and a high-stakes situation that has nothing to do with their sexuality.”

The bleak fictional future depicted in Fragile Remedy came about, Mora writes, because of a pandemic called lung-rot.

Just a coincidence, as the book was finished long before the current pandemic arrived and made itself at home. “I hope for readers it does not hit too close to home in that regard,” Mora explains. “Because it is not a story about a pandemic.

“I want fiction to feel like an escape, even if it’s hitting real-world themes. There’s a lot of themes of addiction in this story, and so I’m already touching on something in the real world. I didn’t want it to be about addiction and then ‘AND NOW …. It’s also about Covid-19!”

The virtual launch party for Fragile Remedy takes place at 7 p.m. Tuesday (March 9) via Tombolo Books; register (for free) here. Mora will appear in conversation with Linsey Miller, author of The Game and Mask of Shadows.