To the Moon and Back (Reese's Book Club): A Novel - Hardcover

Ramage, Eliana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1668065851 ISBN 13: 9781668065853

Verlag: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Steph Harper is convinced that only space—outer space—can save her. From a childhood of fearful running and alienation; from a family and community that threaten to suffocate her with their reverence for the past. Equal parts tender, funny, and heartbreaking, To the Moon and Back charts the course of Steph’s singular dream: to become the first Cherokee astronaut, no matter who or what she has to leave behind.

But despite her self-prescribed loneliness and reckless ambition, Steph’s story isn’t hers alone. To the Moon and Back also brings to life the vibrant, complex women—a celebrity activist younger sister, an ex-Mormon college girlfriend, and a devoted mother with a crushing secret—who insist on loving her…even when she least deserves them.

From a simulated Mars habitat on a Hawaiian volcano, to a house in the Ozark foothills in Cherokee Nation, to a pressurized research station on the floor of the Atlantic and beyond, Steph will stretch her bonds with each of these women to the point of breaking, driving them to reconsider their own deepest desires in her shadow. An awe-inspiringly epic novel of mothers and daughters, sisters and sacrifice, love and loss, terror and wonder, To the Moon and Back is the unforgettable story of one astronaut’s most surprising discovery: how deeply she loves life on earth.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eliana Ramage holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Lambda Literary, Tin House, and Vermont Studio Center. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, she lives in Nashville with her family. To the Moon and Back is her first novel.

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Steph: All That Is or Ever Was or Ever Will Be

STEPH ALL THAT IS OR EVER WAS OR EVER WILL BE

June 1995

Eight Years Later

I was thirteen years old in Oklahoma. Eight years now in the house in Tahlequah to which our mother had brought us. I wanted, more than anything, to be gone.

To outer space. To a better school than my own, that could help me get to outer space. And before that, to Space Camp. At least to Space Camp! The one thing that could hold me over while I waited for the rest of my life.

At Space Camp, I’d heard, you could take turns sleeping in a pod modeled after the real ones. You could zip yourself into a sleeping bag tethered to the wall, strap yourself down and close the hatch like it was real. Like if you didn’t do these things, you’d float away.

I used to get this feeling sometimes, where everything would stop, and it would be like I was flying above myself, watching, remembering the moment I was in but from years ahead. It happened in moments when I most believed that maybe my life would take the shape I wanted it to. I felt that so many nights, with my sister breathing softly in the bunk below. My sister, content. Me sitting up, shivering and wrapped in an old blue quilt, ordered piles of papers spread around me. Flashlight waving over PSAT scores and essays. Financial aid forms filled with numbers, from pay stubs I had slipped from our mother’s purse.

Whenever I started to think about how Phillips Exeter Academy might not let me in, and then how hard it would be to impress NASA without Phillips Exeter Academy, I’d switch off the flashlight. I’d lean back and look up at the glow-in-the-dark stars that Brett, my teacher but also my mother’s boyfriend, had stuck to the ceiling.

I enclosed a letter with my application. I told them I was “on track” to become an astronaut, which meant I’d done very well in middle school science and would likely attend Space Camp in Huntsville that summer.

Then I waited for my Exeter acceptance letter. And I waited for my Space Camp application. My mother had said she would call to request it.

On the phone they said camp costs a thousand dollars. She said thank you and hung up.

She spent the next four weeks changing the subject when I asked about it, and then in April (still no word from Exeter) she sat down me and Kayla and said she had a surprise. (Brett was apparently excused from this family meeting, as he’d gone out to the country. He was visiting his ancient parents, and I wished he’d brought me with him.)

There wasn’t money for Space Camp. It wasn’t happening.

Kayla said, “Got it, okay, can I please be excused?” She’d been calling it “nerd camp” since Thanksgiving.

“No, you listen,” our mother said, “both of you. You’re not going to the Space Camp, but you are going to a Space Camp!”

“Oh no,” Kayla said.

“Huh?” I said.

“I’m running it!” our mother said.

“Oh no,” Kayla said.

“Kayla, watch it,” our mother said, but she looked at me. Her hands gripped the couch cushion under her, tight. Her eyes were bright, wide, daring me not to be thrilled. I watched the clock above the couch, unwove the woven baskets on the bookshelf with my eyes.

Our mother explained that she and Brett had spent the last month staying up late, typing a grant proposal on the computer they’d bought together. “I even had a meeting with an astronomy professor, at his office,” she said, clearly having waited days to tell me that.

“You’re gonna make Cherokee Culture Camp all spacey,” Kayla said, “aren’t you?”

Our mother looked down at her hands, raw and rough but sweet-smelling from the bread factory where she worked. I used to press her palms to my face, used to breathe in the strange mix of rising dough and sharp-smelling machinery.

“You’ll like Space-Culture Camp,” she said.

I said we should try again for Space Camp. The real one, for next year. I could save up. Sometimes Exeter let kids have jobs on campus. I could see myself standing behind a tall marble desk in a library, getting paid to explain things to my fellow students. Maybe I’d wear my hair in a low bun.

Our mother looked like I had hit her. She was quiet and careful, opening her mouth and then closing it, and then she looked at me like, Is this really who you are?

She said, “This is the best that I could do.”

All that was left was to pretend. We nodded and said great, thank you, can’t wait.

We did the dishes. I washed and Kayla dried. I tried to look out the window over the kitchen sink, tried to find the night sky, but the lights were too bright. All I could see was the two of us reflected in the glass. Kayla played the Top 40 countdown on the radio and sang along.

Nothing stuck to her. The way she’d flit through the hallways at school—from class to class, friend to friend—it was incredible to me, and alien. My sister belonged, happily, like she’d sprouted out of the ground behind this house. I was something like a refugee, from a time and place my sister had forgotten. I wished I could have just a little of all that Kayla was.

At Space Camp, you strap into a multi-access trainer—like a spinning cage inside a spinning cage—and are rotated in every direction, no more than two turns the same way in a row, to keep the inner ear fluid from disrupting your balance. Astronaut candidates (they’re called “ascans!”) use something very similar in training, only with a joystick, so they can practice stabilizing a shuttle on reentry if it starts to spin out. Without stabilization, a real astronaut could experience g-forces so strong they die.

Space-Culture Camp was held in the middle school gym. It smelled like boys, and the lights overhead glared bluish green on our skin. Our words clapped off the walls and rushed back loud and harsh.

On the bleachers, which were folded against the wall, our mother had taped cutout paintings of planets and stars. She’d made them herself the night before, on the backs of old protest signs. Moms Against Nukes on the back of Venus. Della Owens Belongs with Her Tribe… Support the Indian Child Welfare Act! on the back of the moon. Our mother was never good at protest slogans and gave too much of herself to other people. When things didn’t go as she had hoped (when, for example, Della Owens was taken from her family and sent back to the adoptive couple in Utah), our mother saw it as evidence of her own powerlessness. Like she alone had let down the world.

After snack time, our mother and Brett stacked everyone into the bed of a truck and drove us to the top of a low hill behind the cemetery. They then brought out a new, clean garbage can with Styrofoam duct-taped to the inside, and tipped it over. One at a time, we put on a helmet and climbed in.

Our mother did a countdown from ten—she was working from a limited base of knowledge, and for near everything we did, she had to say “blastoff”—and pushed us down the hill.

When everyone had gone, we sat in a circle in the grass and talked about how it had felt. How we thought astronauts might...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1668065851
• ISBN 13: 9781668065853
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; AA Utrecht; 3584; Niederlande