To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage
Born in 1982, Steph Harper is a gay Cherokee Nation citizen. Since childhood, her life goal was to be an astronaut. Steph’s story began at five with the car accident in which her mother took her and her younger sister away from their abusive father.
The book begins when Steph is five years old. Following a car accident, her mother took Steph and her younger sister Kayla from Texas to settle with other Cherokee families in Oklahoma. The two truths in Steph’s life are that she is a lesbian, and she wants to be a NASA astronaut. Often, these are in opposition. It is difficult to have a social life when she is constantly working to have a resume attractive to NASA and to maintain her fitness. Also, NASA regulations conflict with her desire for a lesbian relationship.
Highlights:
Steph's earliest memories were of the car accident that killed her abusive father. Her sister Kayla had no memories of the father or the accident. Steph blamed this experience for her seriousness and Kayla’s carefree attitude. Steph took everything hard, while Kayla just went with the flow.
Steph’s first step to becoming an astronaut was a good education, starting with the exclusive boarding school, Phillips Exeter. She didn’t go there, but she attended Hollis in Connecticut. (I suspect this is a disguised Wesleyan.)
In high school, she played a male
in the school play. When she kissed Meredith, the girl playing opposite her,
she discovered that she was gay. Meredith was not.
At college, she met Della Owens, her first love. Della was the subject of a Supreme Court case about the Indian Child Welfare Act. Her Cherokee father wanted custody, but the court sided with the adoptive parents. (See Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl). Kayla visited Steph at school and became pregnant at a college party.
When Steph was selected as an astronaut candidate, she was on a NASA exercise in Hawaii, and sister Kayla protested the activity. Meanwhile, during the exercise, Steph has a crush on another astronaut candidate, Nadia.
The book refers to many historical events: after the 2024 election, she protested a travel ban against people from seven Muslim-majority countries, the border wall, the deportation of immigrants, and pulling out of an agreement on climate change mitigation.
Some quotes/excerpts:
We took off our coats at the door of Alpha Omega and tied them together by the arms. When it was time to go it would be easier to find them in the dark, in the massive pile accumulated on a stranger’s bed. And it was safer, Sandra said, because the number one rule of going out together was going home together. In our first week of school, Sandra had stood in the kitchen and demonstrated the arm-tying trick with her coat and April’s coat, saying, “So now if I’m super drunk, like, black-out drunk, and some guy’s trying to take me back to his dorm, I can’t leave without going through the whole rope of coats. And while I’m standing there wrestling with the arm-knots, you people can save me.”
I was the kind of person who destroyed herself over missed data from an X-ray space telescope. Over a supernova, the death of a star.
The crops were planted by a person we enslaved. The treaty was signed for a profit. The seminary taught mostly what we’d need in the coming white world. My great-grandfather left his daughter in a barn, my grandfather locked his daughter out of the house, and my father drove from one life into another. And my great-grandmother stayed, and my grandmother stayed, and my mother stayed, until she didn’t.
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