To the Moon and Back
A Reese’s Book Club Pick about a Cherokee woman’s queer coming-of-age and impossible astronaut dream
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- $189.00
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- $189.00
Descripción editorial
‘Will break your heart and take you to the stars. I loved it.’ Kiley Reid
‘A breathtaking debut about family, identity, and love across generations.’ Reese Witherspoon
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Steph Harper was born running. Now she is reaching for the moon.
When Steph was five, her mother fled with Steph and her little sister to a small Cherokee community, searching for safety, home and a future.
Years later, Steph has one impossible ambition: to become the first Cherokee astronaut. To get there, she is willing to leave almost everything behind – her past, her family, and the people who know her best.
But ambition has a gravity of its own. As Steph chases the stars, the women closest to her are pulled into their own reckonings: Kayla, her brilliant younger sister; Hannah, the mother guarding a buried family history; and Della, the girlfriend who challenges Steph’s idea of escape.
Spanning decades, continents and one unforgettable family, To the Moon and Back is a sweeping literary family saga about queer love, Cherokee identity, mothers and daughters, sacrifice and the price of chasing a dream when home still has a hold on you.
A Reese’s Book Club Pick for readers who love emotionally powerful book club fiction.
‘A singular, sonorous, wholehearted novel, one I wanted to devour and savour at once.’ Claire Lombardo, bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had
‘A powerful story about the mixture of combativeness, compromise and love that forms the heart of a family.’ Kaliane Bradley, bestselling author of The Ministry of Time
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.
