TO THE MOON AND BACK

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!