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. My mother took my sister and me
and she drove through the night to a place she felt a claim to a place on earth she thought we
might be safe. I stopped asking questions. I picked little glass pieces from my sister’s hair.
I watched the moon. Steph Harper is on the run. When she was five her mother fled an
abusive husband—with Steph and her younger sister in tow—to Cherokee Nation where she hoped
they might finally belong. In response Steph sets her sights as far away from Oklahoma as she
can get vowing that she will let nothing get in the way of pursuing the rigorous physical and
academic training she knows she will need to be accepted by NASA and ultimately to go to the
moon. Spanning three decades and several continents To the Moon and Back encompasses Steph’s
turbulent journey along with the multifaceted and intertwined lives of the three women closest
to her: her sister Kayla an artist who goes on to become an Indigenous social media influencer
and whose determination to appear good takes her life to unexpected places Steph’s college
girlfriend Della Owens who strives to reclaim her identity as an adult after being removed
from her Cherokee family through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act and Hannah Steph
and Kayla’s mother who has held up her family’s tribal history as a beacon of inspiration to
her children all the while keeping her own past a secret. In Steph’s certainty that only her
ambition can save her she will stretch her bonds with each of these women to the point of
breaking at once betraying their love and generosity and forcing them to reconsider their own
deepest desires in her shadow. Told through an intricately woven tapestry of narrative To the
Moon and Back is an astounding and expansive novel of mothers and daughters love and sacrifice
alienation and heartbreak terror and wonder. At its core it is the story of the extraordinary
lengths to which one woman will go to find space for herself.
