“I wanted, more than anything, to be gone.”
When I read the synopsis of Eliana Ramage’s debut, To the Moon and Back (Avid Reader Press 2025), I was immediately sold. A young woman, exploring her sexuality and identity, embarks on a three-decade long quest to become the first Native American female astronaut. (As a note – the first Indigenous woman to travel to space was Nicole Aunapu Mann in 2022.) The novel centers primarily on Steph Harper from 1987 to 2017 (with an epilogue that jumps to 2027), but it does deviate into other women in her life. The deviations into Della and eventually Kayla are ultimately why I think this novel is not as successful as it could be – it’s a bit of a chaotic jumbled mess. If the focus had been on Steph, without POV switching, it would have been better structured and significantly stronger. This may be my top disappointment of 2025.
When Steph is a child, her mother flees an abusive husband and settles in Cherokee Nation, hoping to reclaim a part of her identity. Whereas Steph’s younger sister, Kayla, readily adapts, Steph maintains an arm’s length approach to this part of her identity; the disconnect will trail behind her for decades. Steph’s singular goal is to become an astronaut, and everything and everyone else comes second to that goal.
While in college, as far from Oklahoma as she could get, Steph meets Della. Della is a bit of a celebrity due to a legal battle as a child involving the Indian Welfare Act. She is raised by her Mormon adoptive parents with one day a year spent with her father in Oklahoma. She also sought to get as far away as she could so that she could more openly embrace an indigenous culture she’d been denied as a child.
Both Steph and Della struggle with their sexual identity and ultimately end up in a relationship that is marked by secrets. Ramage gives Della a lot of page space in the novel before abruptly removing her – sending her on a journey we don’t see and only get a few sentences about toward the end. It was jarring that a novel seemingly set up to be about two women, both with struggles surrounding parents and identity, suddenly becomes entirely about Steph’s singular journey and the overlap with her sister’s activism.
The novel is great in concept but fails in execution because it’s doing too much and not enough all at the same time.
A Girl Named Tommi 