To the Moon and Back (Reese's Book Club)
A Novel
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- 14,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK: “A breathtaking debut about family, identity, and love across generations.” —Reese Witherspoon
“Eliana Ramage will break your heart and take you to the stars. From painfully accurate depictions of adolescence to effortless jumps through time and space—I loved it all.” —Kiley Reid
In this dazzlingly powerful story of family, ambition and belonging, one young woman’s obsessive quest to become the first Cherokee astronaut irrevocably alters the fates of the people she loves most.
Steph Harper is convinced that only space—outer space—can save her. From a childhood of fearful running and alienation; from a family and community that threaten to suffocate her with their reverence for the past. Equal parts tender, funny, and heartbreaking, To the Moon and Back charts the course of Steph’s singular dream: to become the first Cherokee astronaut, no matter who or what she has to leave behind.
But despite her self-prescribed loneliness and reckless ambition, Steph’s story isn’t hers alone. To the Moon and Back also brings to life the vibrant, complex women—a celebrity activist younger sister, an ex-Mormon college girlfriend, and a devoted mother with a crushing secret—who insist on loving her…even when she least deserves them.
From a simulated Mars habitat on a Hawaiian volcano, to a house in the Ozark foothills in Cherokee Nation, to a pressurized research station on the floor of the Atlantic and beyond, Steph will stretch her bonds with each of these women to the point of breaking, driving them to reconsider their own deepest desires in her shadow. An awe-inspiringly epic novel of mothers and daughters, sisters and sacrifice, love and loss, terror and wonder, To the Moon and Back is the unforgettable story of one astronaut’s most surprising discovery: how deeply she loves life on earth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The touching debut from Ramage focuses on a young Cherokee woman's struggle to become the first Native American astronaut. In 1990s Oklahoma, 13-year-old Steph Harper longs to attend Space Camp and applies to a private school, hoping it will put her on the path. Rummaging through her mother's purse, she finds a scholarship offer from the school and is bereft to realize she's missed the deadline to accept, and that her mother kept the news from her ("I saw my mother holding me back, so afraid... that she'd force on me a small life"). Steph never loses her ambition to travel to space and eventually attends a private college in rural Connecticut, where she has a tumultuous romantic relationship with fellow Indigenous student Della. After drifting through a series of online hookups in graduate school, Steph is chosen for astronaut training in Hawaii, but tensions arise when her younger sister arrives to protest NASA's installation of a large telescope on sacred Indigenous lands. While Ramage sets a leisurely pace at the beginning, readers will be rewarded once Steph starts to achieve small victories in her quest. It's a satisfying exploration of a woman's determination to realize her potential.
