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.
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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.
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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.
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Well, how often had I met one who identified me as something that they, too, were?
Never. Not until then.
***
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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.
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***
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
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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 [censored]t 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.