To the Moon and Back Author: Eliana Ramage ISBN-13: 9781529939576Publisher: DoubledayGuideline Price: £18.99To the Moon and Back, Eliana Ramage’s novel about a Cherokee lesbian aspiring astronaut, is a jubilant cosmic coming of age. In her quest for outer space, its heroine, Steph Harper, embarks on an adventure that takes her under the ocean and to two volcanoes, while navigating the disastrous emotional geography of family, identity, and romance. It’s a lot of ground to cover, beginning with Steph escaping a car crash with her mother and sister. “There was blood there back in Texas,” she explains, “and tiny shards of glass still covered my sister.” They’re fleeing to Oklahoma, where Steph’s ancestors resettled during the Trail of Tears – the forced, genocidal 19th-century Native American migration that uprooted people from their homes and killed 25 per cent. Steph’s singular stubbornness (“If I was feeling petty, which I often was”) is hilarious. Her teenage years are a series of melodramas balanced with empirical specificity. “My heart, metaphorically, fell out my butt,” she comments when her school crush embraces her. Catching her stepfather with another woman, she panics: “Brett was my one ally on the journey to space. I couldn’t lose him.” Hers is the pain of when a parent betrays you, but also pragmatic and self-serving, qualities that make Steph lousy to those she loves, but makes us love her more.For Steph, life is about untangling what she indisputably is – a queer, Cherokee female – from what she desires to be. “Since I was a child,” she explains, “I’d been fighting for my space.” But while Steph finds her identity suffocating, Ramage has fun with it, from the Cherokee Space-Culture Camp devised by Steph’s parents, to her sister Kayla blogging about Five Products I Can’t Live Without as an Indigenous Mother in a Protest. There are outsized plot lines and personalities: Steph’s college girlfriend, a Mormon marine biologist, made headlines as a baby in a Cherokee adoption battle. This is not a subtle book, and its revelations can be somewhat predictable. “Mine was the story of many,” Steph muses, “one thread of a history that wasn’t over.” Still it’s refreshing to read a novel that addresses life’s difficulties without being tormented, and with its simply expressed emotions and absence of unkind characters, it’s reminiscent of a children’s classic in spirit. Like its heroine, To the Moon and Back charms because it refuses to grow up. We forgive it when it oversimplifies, because it never loses its humour and dogged innocence that persists in colouring its blue-sky view. Mei Chin is a writer from New York City living in Dublin