To The Moon And Back by Eliana Ramage

This is a book that is one of Reese Witherspoon’s book of the month choices and I have been slowly but surely reading my way through those. This one I found to be a little confusing period I read it over several weeks so in bits and pieces and that may have been a contributing factor. In the end I was glad that I read it especially when you consider um that there are very few Native American authors writing fiction. Thirteen-year-old Steph Harper knows she is different from her friends and classmates living in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, in 1995. Determined to be an astronaut, she notes, “I only had about a decade or so to rid myself of every fear I had left,” replacing them with what NASA calls “awareness and preparedness and disaster response protocol.” Steph’s single-minded drive forms the heart of a drama that unfolds from those teen years through 2027 while deftly exploring Cherokee identity, queer love and the price of ambition. Steph’s father, whom she, her mother and younger sister Kayla fled eight years ago, instilled in her a love of space while warning her about the end of the world. Those mixed emotions and strengths end up dictating the course of Steph’s life in wildly unpredictable ways, especially when endless obstacles seem to stand in her way. She is surprised to fall in love with a Cherokee college classmate, Della Owens, who as a baby was adopted and raised by a Mormon couple, and, after a highly public custody battle, allowed only one day of visitation a year with her birth father. While Della fully embraces her Cherokee heritage, Steph focuses on escaping to space.