Eliana Ramage's debut, To the Moon and Back, is a far-reaching, ever-surprising, intricate novel about identity, family, ambitions, career, romance and, yes, astronomy.

When readers meet Steph Harper, she is almost six years old. "I imagine her terrified. Our mother. Two children in the backseat. She drove like a woman followed, even after we left him at the foot of that tall hill. There was blood there, back in Texas, and tiny shards of glass still covered my sister." Their mother, Hannah, is in flight from a vague threat--abuse, trauma--with her two little girls in tow. Precocious Steph is already developing her obsession with astronomy. Kayla is just a baby, sparkling in broken glass but unscathed by what haunts the others: "Our mother would never have Kayla's confidence because Kayla had no memory of another self. Of another place. Of what was possible, here on earth. Maybe what was wrong with our mother was also wrong with me."

From Texas, the fragile family resettles in the Cherokee Nation, in Tahlequah, where Hannah hopes to recover community and reclaim her heritage. Steph and Kayla learn to speak Cherokee. Steph watches the sky and fine-tunes her plans to become an astronaut: when readers meet her for the second time, she is 13 and concerned only with getting into Exeter Academy, which she hopes will put her on course for Harvard and then NASA. She studies the biographies of astronauts and the hard science she will need, with the help of a telescope gifted to her by her mother's new boyfriend, Brett. "It had been my goal to understand the origins of earth, the universe, and everything in it by my fourteenth birthday. I was behind schedule." This dream is what gives Steph's life focus; she needs this to live. "I'd picture an astronaut watching me back. Some astronaut would call his daughter through mission control and she'd say tell me what you see and he'd say oh, the Northern Hemisphere, North America, and that would be true, but also true was Oklahoma, a field, a tree. A girl alone, looking up." It is also true that the dream, which in some ways saves her, may be what keeps her from finding happiness in relationships on Earth: with her mother, her sister, or the love of her life.

Distracting her along the way are her feelings for girls, which she suspects will not be appreciated in Tahlequah: "If I could figure out the money and the applications and the getting myself to college, I decided I would be gay. Or bi, maybe? At schools like Harvard, they let you figure that out."

As Steph moves from Tahlequah to Hollis College in rural Connecticut, a parallel character is introduced. She was named Della Owens at birth, when she was adopted by a Mormon couple in Provo, Utah. But as the center of a legal case resting upon the Indian Child Welfare Act, she became known as Baby D. Many Native Americans believe she belongs with her people. Della's path intersects Steph's when they find themselves at Hollis together, and they will intertwine from there, coming of age in parallel and navigating romance, Native heritage, and ambition.

For a portion of the book, Della's first-person voice alternates chapter-by-chapter with Steph's, which otherwise dominates. Later, these perspectives are joined by various epistolary elements: e-mails, social media posts, text messages. To the Moon and Back excels in surprise; these points of view are only one area in which Ramage takes her reader in unexpected directions, geographically and otherwise. The novel is gloriously expansive, epic, and sweeping. It covers just a couple decades, from 1995 to 2017, although the history of previous generations certainly comes to bear on the present timeline. But like Steph herself, the story keeps reaching beyond its expected limits. It is not only a coming-of-age story, but also about a variety of Native American experiences, and about queer experiences and those intersections. It's about lofty goals, astronomy, and yearning. Just when readers grasp the enormity of Steph's single-minded focus on becoming an astronaut, she reaches further, to becoming a better human being. The events of Steph's life are often sensational, but always, in Ramage's expert storytelling, believable.

So many threads would be too much for a less skilled writer to wrangle, but these characters are developed with such steady pacing, depth, and perfect detail that they always feel natural. A plot summary with spoilers would sound, perhaps, absurd. But To the Moon and Back is anything but. It is a complex, absorbing, thought-provoking novel, compulsively readable. Steph is exceptionally eccentric, and her story is also universal, all-encompassing. Her impressive character arc comes, eventually, to wisdom and an unlikely peace: "I want to love the universe, even if I don't know what it is. I do not have to know what it is." Readers will be enriched for having shared these pages with her. --Julia Kastner  

Eliana Ramage (photo: Leah Margulies)

Eliana Ramage holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has received residencies and fellowships from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Lambda Literary, Tin House, and Vermont Studio Center. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, she lives in Nashville, Tenn., with her family. Her first novel, To the Moon and Back (Avid Reader Press, October 28, 2025), is the spellbinding story of a woman who aims to become the first Cherokee astronaut, with her loved ones and generations of history as backdrop.

Why space? (Which came first: Steph or the astronaut dream?)

Actually, Della came first! I started writing about Della when I was about 23 years old. I loved her. For me, she's the easiest to love. I wrote a novel draft from her perspective, astronaut-less, and when I brought in Steph there was still something missing. When Steph turned out to really want something (space travel!), and when she came to live in the same fictional world as Della instead of in a separate project, I got what it meant to need an engine in a novel for the long haul.

As for why space? I love space! I've always loved it, since I was a kid watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my brothers. The show taught me to have optimism when it comes to the far future. It's easy to feel like there's no point in our efforts towards good--for other people, for the earth, for both--when you assume we will always do terrible things to each other. Space exploration, an extremely long-term group project, carries a lot of weight for a novel that's interested in who we are and what kind of world we'll leave behind. When I say "group" I mean humanity, and I also mean specifically Cherokees. I wanted Cherokee people in the novel to grapple with their identities, as people everywhere have done forever. What does it mean to be Cherokee? When we're living on Mars--an inclusive and optimistic "we," because I'd be dead or unwilling--that question will still be there.

Is this a coming-of-age novel?

At first the book was heavily focused on Steph's early years, because I defined "coming-of-age" more narrowly and as the kind of writer and reader I was. And that's still true, I'll read any yearning queer kid with big ambitions!

What changed is that I got older. This book took me up to age 34, with stops like coming out and having a child. The mom-as-side-character turned out to be (of course!) more complicated than I'd thought, and I revisited Steph's first love with different expectations for what it could hold.

This is still a coming-of-age novel, but now I know personhood isn't static after a character makes it through their teens. We see how much Steph changes and surprises herself, all the ways her life expands outwards for better or for worse, which is something I didn't know to expect for myself in my early 20s. Now it's one of my best hopes for anyone.

You've created an interesting blend of points of view and epistolary fragments. How did you choose which voices to highlight?

Kayla, Hannah, and Della are all characters who are or who become hyperaware of how they're understood by others. For Kayla there's the pressure to be a certain kind of Native woman on social media; for Della there's the worry that her story will continue to be told for her after her Native identity was picked apart on a national scale; and for Hannah there's the tension between what to share with her children and what to keep for herself.

A few years ago, I was messing around with my computer on an airplane and thought it would be a funny exercise to ask how Steph might represent herself on Tinder over about a decade. But 10 years of Tinder profiles is 10 years of choosing how you want to be seen and judged. It went from a joke to something deeper, and I leaned into epistolary forms for other characters. Stepping outside of first-person point-of-view for Kayla, Hannah, and Della meant a more conscious engagement with questions of representation.

Your characters navigate identity, trauma, science, ambition, romantic and familial relationships. How did you handle keeping so many threads balanced in the larger narrative?

I'm so glad I get to talk about school supplies! There were so, so many school supplies. While the novel itself went through a lot of change, I stayed obsessed with trying to organize it. Post-it notes, highlighters, stickers on top of Post-it notes to indicate several things tracked within a single scene... I was inspired by [author] Claire Lombardo, who back in grad school built the most beautiful storyboards and color-coded charts that I've ever seen.

Between drafts, I'd make storyboards where different threads were different colors (i.e., "Green is science, according to this green index card this scene is science-y, oh NO wait, why have we not seen a green sticky note for 100+ pages?!").

By the time I made it to my last three years of edits, I had an evolving system of checklists. As I read each chapter, I'd make myself check off that yes, this chapter had addressed/touched on/hinted at [insert long list of threads I was determined to keep in balance]. Some of the things I'd check for were broad, like the heading "Astro!" to make sure the novel hadn't strayed from its interest in space. But some were weirdly specific, like (for example) "[Bicycle] Where?" That one meant that for a few objects that really don't spend much time on the page, I wanted to remember where they'd been stashed and ask myself if they were needed.

To what extent are Steph's or Della's remarkable lives based on true stories?

Steph became a character after the first Cherokee Tri-Council meeting, which I attended in 2012 with my family and two Cherokee friends. That first version of Steph wasn't interested in space, which is wild to me now. Looking back, I think No-Space Steph would react to other people and their actions, but she didn't have that drive to push forward on her own.

A few years later, long after Steph had become an aspiring astronaut, my brother began a Ph.D. program. He was studying the political and economic history of the Cherokee Nation between 1866 and 1906. Just about everything I was starting to learn from him was surprising to me--regarding both our nation and our own ancestors.

One day, when I was visiting friends in Oklahoma, my brother invited me to join him in the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma. That, along with several years of sibling talks that would follow, complicated and deepened my understanding of Cherokee identity and how it was understood in the past and today.

I wanted that for Steph, particularly as she looks to the future, so I decided that up until the year 1860 her ancestors would be my ancestors. Lending Steph a real, research-based history wasn't the key to many answers for Steph. But it raised questions! And, importantly, it added Steph to a conversation that had begun long before her. --Julia Kastner