To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage: Knowing who you are

Eliana Ramage’s debut, To the Moon and Back, is quite a doorstopper but I was looking for some thing to take my mind off the state of the world so quit my dithering and jumped in. It follows Steph who becomes fixated on becoming an astronaut as a young child, determined to become the first Indigenous woman to walk on the moon.

To be an astronaut – to be myself – without the weight of everything that came before. 

Steph’s memories are a little hazy but she knows that she and her mother escaped a car crash along with her little sister Kayla, and found their way to Tahlequah, Oklahoma where Hannah had once lived, thrown out by her parents when she was pregnant. As they grow up, Hannah desperate to instil pride in their Cherokee identity, Kayla happily fits in while Steph single-mindedly focusses on her ambition, encouraged by her mother’s new partner. Their violent, unstable father, they’re told, died in an accident. Steph knows her ambition will be well nigh impossible to attain but persistence and hard work pay off: she’s accepted as an astronaut candidate, the first step on a long arduous path that will see her family and her ambition clash in a way that endangers both.

Our mother had come here looking for our nation and ancestors, for the purity of a story to save her. Or to tell her who she was, and then forgive her for it. It doesn’t exist.

There’s rather more to this ambitious novel which explores many forms of identity than that brief synopsis suggests. Ramage has woven a great deal of research both about the space programme and the Cherokee Nation to which she belongs through this story of three generations of women told primarily through Steph. She’s a hard character to like – self-absorbed, seemingly oblivious to the sacrifices that others make for her not least the women who fall in love with her, eyes set on an apparently unattainable aim. It’s a tribute to Ramage’s characterisation that I came to hope that she’d get there. Woven through her narrative is her complicated family story in which Kayla plays a large part, forging her own identity online as a proud stay-at-home Cherokee mother, her uncomfortably authentic Instagram posts scattered through the text. From her author’s note, it’s clear that many of the incidents in Ramage’s novel are based in fact and although I enjoyed her novel, I felt her research got the better of her hence its length. Worth reading but bear that in mind.

Doubleday: London 9781529939576 416 pages Hardback (read via NetGalley)