This author is as ambitious as her protagonist: There are three novels worth of material here, all good. The moon or bust!
As gifted as she is driven, a young Cherokee woman powers through trauma and turbulence to realize her astronaut dreams.
Two really excellent lesbian astronaut books in one year? Yes, it’s true, and may this one, an ambitious debut from a young Cherokee author, catch the wave created by Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere. Ramage’s version begins in June 1987, with 6-year-old Steph Harper in the back seat of a car driven by her mother, Hannah, picking shards of glass out of her little sister Kayla’s hair. The three are on the run from an incident that we won’t fully learn about till the end of the book, about 30 years and 450 action-packed pages later. The threesome stop and resettle in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, part of the Cherokee Nation, and it’s there that Steph begins to dream her big dreams, applying to Phillips Exeter Academy, begging her mother to send her to Space Camp, and having to settle for a homemade version put on by Hannah and her boyfriend, Brett. The childhood section of the book is strong; the school play, in which Steph gets the part of the husband of her secret crush, Meredith, as their entire family dies on the Trail of Tears, shows off Ramage’s ability to serve the funny-sad combination with brio. Equally memorable is a later section set in a “hab,” an isolated residence in which an astronaut crew lives for a year to simulate space travel, and this particular one is surrounded by an encampment of protestors who object to NASA’s use of Indigenous Hawaiian lands. There’s much, much more packed into this John Irving–esque tragicomic saga. One of Steph’s girlfriends was the focus of a famous forced adoption case under the Indian Child Welfare act. Another witnessed a subway shooting as a child and now belongs to a New York–based group of queer Muslims. Steph’s sister, Kayla, becomes a top Indigenous Instagram influencer about the same time she becomes a teenage mom. Almost all the characters are obsessed with Native history and the lives of their ancestors. And one character is…a shark. Yes, the kind in the ocean.
This author is as ambitious as her protagonist: There are three novels worth of material here, all good. The moon or bust!Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668065853
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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