I met Eliana on a humid July day in the Portland airport, circa 2022. We had texted a few times back and forth, planning to rideshare to Reed College on our way to the Tin House Summer Workshop, and I was both soothed and surprised by her use of exclamation points, the way her warmth exuded from a few simple words. Standing by baggage claim, sweaty and unmoored, about fifteen thousand words of what I hoped to be a novel to my name and little else, it felt like a beginning, even if I didn’t feel particularly auspicious.

Autumn, hello! Eliana said, when she reached my little corner, and I smiled under my mask, the papery fabric slipping up my cheekbones and nearly covering my eyes.

Hello, I said. It’s so good to see you. I have no idea where we’re even going.

Eliana laughed, said: I saw your name and immediately clocked you as Cherokee. Obviously, I thought I need to be that person’s friend.

I laughed, too, and yet felt delighted by her use of obviously. Obviously, I thought.

There are only so many of us, I said, and it was true. How often had I met another Indigenous writer in a space filled with writers? Oh so rarely. How often had I met one from the same tribe? Once, maybe. Twice. Never my age, either.

Well, how often had I met one who identified me as something that they, too, were?

Never. Not until then.

***To put my friendship with the author at the forefront of this review of To the Moon and Back is not my intention, as I believe this book is so good that to center it and it alone is really all one needs, but I do believe context is important. To review a book is, of course, not a science, but an art. There are feelings at play, and to pretend otherwise does nothing for no one. So, take this as context, dear reader, but not explanation for my regard for this book.

***Another thing that is context, but not explanation.

On the back of a newish edition of The Rings of Saturn, which some mistakenly consider a book of nonfiction, the description lists “a few of the things that cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald).” It is this distinction regarding the narrator, or lack thereof, that remains something I cannot let go of. To be something, or rather, someone, and to not be someone, equally, a frozen state. If I were younger, if I were not what I have become, perhaps I might write something to the effect of how it felt, as a child, to stare at my rounded white stomach and tanned arms side-by-side in the bath, the long, black hairs that cover most of my body, sometimes pelt-like, slicked down over my forearms. I felt that I could delineate, then, which parts of me were Native, and which parts of me were not. Though no one said Native, back then. They said Indian. When people ask me what I prefer, even now, my first thought is always — why the hell are you asking me?

***To the Moon and Back is a novel about, to put it very simply, “One young woman’s relentless quest to become the first Cherokee astronaut,” something that “will alter the fates of the people she loves most.”

In practice, however, this book is that and so much more. At once a love story and a family epic, To the Moon and Back spans three decades and several continents, and follows not only our main character, Steph Harper, but her sister, Kayla, her mother, Hannah, and her (college) girlfriend, Della. To tell the story of deeply ambitious Steph, who both delights you and, sometimes, makes you want to shake her, would be feat enough, but to wind together a tenderhearted novel of such precision and wonder is another thing entirely.

Ramage, it should be noted, spent 12 years at work on this book. In a world of fast-paced output and instant gratification, to behold something that has been tapestried over so many years is something palpable.

***The novel opens with a breathless sequence: Steph, Kayla, and Hannah’s flight from Texas to rural Oklahoma, to a part of the country I know more intimately than the back of my hand. It is there, Oklahoma, that this little family, damaged as they might be by their pasts, will grow and live together, and where Steph, like myself, will long for an escape.

It is there, too, where Hannah will impart on her girls the stories of their tribal history (or, as the reader discovers later, a version of this history), at once inside of them and outside of them, complicated and yet still being written by virtue of their survival. This is an especially important thing to note when thinking of how to write about this novel. There is a specific tribal history at play, one with records and touchstones. It surrounds the place they find themselves in, and yet, Steph often resists this and the sense of collectivism involved. She wants to be something, and that thing is not just Cherokee. Who among us, in our youth, hasn’t felt the same?

***I had no teacher. No one to tell me anything about myself, or what was not myself, but something else, a lineage that had dates and numbers and quantums. In reading this book, I felt more Cherokee than I ever have before, because I was not just feeling good about being a “part” of something, but I was also learning about the place I had sprung from, geographically and otherwise. I was engaging with the history, not just tribal, but of the United States as a whole, and I was doing so in a narrative that felt warm, terrifying, funny, sad, wondrous, alienating, welcoming, and fully realized.

Writing about To the Moon and Back, not just reading it, has also made me particularly aware of my own deficits of describing things without spoiling them. For there is truly a wealth to discover in this book, not just about the realization of Steph’s journey, but about the people who orbit her as well. Usually, I wouldn’t be so concerned about this, but part of the magic of this novel is the way it unfolds, and the recurrence of the details you held on to in earlier sections, suddenly, beautifully, making their appearance.

That said, perhaps the most important part of the way Ramage deals with the multiple threads in this novel is that, though the writing is tender and heartfelt, she does not shy away from bad feelings, heartbreak, politics, or personal decisions that seem neither smart or advisable. In this way, the novel remains rooted in its realism, while also allowing the reader to come to their own sympathies and judgment.

***The structure of To the Moon and Back is particularly compelling. It is composed of Parts, and those Parts are assigned a span of years or a singular year. For example, Part One traces 1995 to 2000, and Part Two the years of 2000 to 2004. In particular, reading about Steph and Della’s college years, and the sections from 2016 struck me most.

This structure not only serves as a smart way of organizing the book but a way to fully immerse the reader in the timeframe they are reading about. To have a novel so rich in detail, and with so many characters, could soon become overwhelming, but Ramage utilizes short chapters, and with them, the name of the character narrating said chapter, and, if switching or skipping time, an orienting date.

This function, instead of demeaning the reader’s intelligence (which is sometimes the case in books that use structural hints) serves to pull the reader’s attention close, in an intimate fashion. Ramage, too, knows when to employ an epistolary section, whether that be through text message or email or dating app (or, in minor spoiler fashion: a news clipping).

Together, we go to Europe, to Hawaiʻi, to… maybe even the moon?

***While the heart of this novel is Steph’s ambition — her true desire to yoke herself to her mission — the animating force is that of family, and of love. I would be remiss not to mention, specifically, her romantic love for Della, and the youthful wounds they inflict upon each other. Della, you see, is Cherokee, too, but not in the same way as Steph. Adopted by a white couple through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act (and based on the real life case of baby Veronica), Della is especially sympathetic, a young person in a world that does not care for young people and who is seeking, in a profound way, who she really is.

This novel is queer in the best ways, outwardly, and not shying away from the issues that might spring from this. It is a book for the general reader, the literary fiction lover, and the curiously minded. It opens one up to the experience of being loved, of wanting something so badly it changes the course of your life, and, of course, to experiences that are not your own. From astronaut to social media influence and Indian activist, from Cherokee mother to geodesic dome dweller to layperson, To the Moon and Back truly has something for everyone.