To the Moon and Back

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. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Gernert Co. (Sept.)