To the Moon and Back: A Novel

Summary

In this 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 on the run. She has been all her life, ever since her mother drove five-year-old Steph and her younger sister through the night to Cherokee Nation, a place they had never been but where she hoped they might finally belong. In response to the turmoil, Steph sets her sights as far away from Oklahoma as she can get, vowing that she will let nothing get in the way of pursuing the rigorous physical and academic training she knows she will need to be accepted by NASA, and ultimately, to go to the moon.

Spanning three decades and several continents, To the Moon and Back encompasses Steph’s turbulent journey, along with the multifaceted and intertwined lives of the three women closest to her. They include her sister Kayla, an artist who goes on to become an Indigenous social media influencer and whose determination to appear good takes her life to unexpected places; Steph’s college girlfriend Della Owens, who strives to reclaim her identity as an adult after being removed from her Cherokee family through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act; and Hannah, Steph and Kayla’s mother, who has held up her family’s tribal history as a beacon of inspiration to her children, all the while keeping her own past a secret.

In Steph’s certainty that only her ambition can save her, she will stretch her bonds with each of these women to the point of breaking, at once betraying their love and generosity and forcing them to reconsider their own deepest desires in her shadow.

Told through an intricately woven tapestry of narrative, this book is an astounding and expansive novel of mothers and daughters, love and sacrifice, alienation and heartbreak, terror and wonder. At its core, it is the story of the extraordinary lengths to which one woman will go to find space for herself.