To the Moon and Back Eliana Ramage This reading group guide for To the Moon and Back includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Eliana Ramage. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book. Introduction Steph Harper is on the run. When she was five, her mother fled an abusive husband--with Steph and her younger sister in tow--to Cherokee Nation, where she hoped they might finally belong. In response, 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: 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, To the Moon and Back 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. Topics & Questions for Discussion 1. Brainstorm some adjectives to describe Steph, Kayla, Felicia, and Hannah. What traits do they share? Which traits create the biggest rifts between them? Is there a character who resonates strongly with you? 2. In Part One, Hannah tells Steph and Kayla the story of their ancestors'' experience of Removal; later, Brett tells the Harper sisters about Cherokee Freedmen. How does this information reverberate throughout the novel? 3. During a fight over the historical inaccuracy of a peacock feather cape, Kayla accuses Hannah of not feeling "authentically Indian enough" (page 47).

What does that phrase mean to Kayla in that moment, and how does the meaning evolve for her over the course of the novel? What does being "authentically Indian" mean to Steph, Hannah, and Della? 4. Think back to Steph''s loves, including Meredith, Della, the physicist, and Nadia. How would you describe each relationship? Does Steph demonstrate any romantic patterns? What about any signs of growth? 5. Men like Brett, Matthew, and David (or the memory of him) play significant roles in To the Moon and Back . How are Steph, Kayla, and Della affected by their varying approaches to fatherhood? 6. To the Moon and Back features multiple instances of blended families with nontraditional structures or origin stories, including single motherhood and adoption. Compare and contrast the parenting styles Ramage depicts, and the choices that characters like the Ericsons, Kayla, and Della make for their children. 7.

In the fall of freshman year, Della thinks about the "shadow-life we carry alongside us, the choices we could have made" (page 144). By the end of the novel, what do you think Della might consider her shadow-life? What about Steph, Hannah, and Kayla? 8. How does Ramage differentiate the various mediums she includes in the book--like texting, Instagram posts, hab logs, and dating profiles--stylistically? How did you feel about this departure from standard prose? 9. How did learning the true circumstances of David''s death affect your reading of the book, specifically of Steph and Hannah as characters? Were you surprised by the twist? 10. What would happen to your experience of the book if Ramage had decided to write the story of Steph''s life from Steph''s perspective only? Are there other characters you would want to know via a first-person point of view? 11. What were your favorite lines or moments from the novel? Did any make you laugh? What about cry? 12. What lessons does Steph learn by the novel''s end, and what will you take away from the experience of reading To the Moon and Back? Enhance Your Book Club 1. As a group, come up with a list of other novels that you have read by Indigenous American writers about Indigenous American characters, and discuss how these selections differ from or are similar to To the Moon and Back .

2. Refer to Ramage''s "Author''s Note" (page 429) and research the real-life inspiration for the events of the book. What do you discover? 3. Cast the To the Moon and Back movie or miniseries: choose your top picks for the main roles and make a case to the larger group about who would best embody each character. A Conversation with Eliana Ramage How did you come up with the general concept for To the Moon and Back ? Do you have a personal relationship to space? I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation with my brothers as a kid, and I took it as a lesson in optimism: to not be so afraid of aliens, and to not assume people will always do terrible things to each other. People do do terrible things to each other, and I feel that particularly in the current political moment. But I refuse the idea that there''s no point in action, or no responsibility to repair the world. That said, Steph is focused on escape for a reason.

She is vulnerable, and we''re vulnerable as humans on this one Earth. For a sometimes scared and laser-focused character like Steph, it can be hard to step back and appreciate the need for other people. Space exploration, which I see as 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 changing identity across time. What does it mean to be Cherokee? When we''re living on Mars--an inclusive and optimistic "we"--that question will still be there. The novel is particularly interested in our accountability, to the Earth and to each other. And in which stories we choose to tell and which we don''t, and what that means for the people who come after us.

Could you describe a bit about how your own identity influenced this book? Hannah, Steph''s mother, finds meaning and inspiration--sometimes too much--in her family''s Cherokee history. A few years into writing this novel, I realized that her history couldn''t be a symbolic idea (e.g., "the ancestors"). Even if they were to exist offstage, in a time the novel doesn''t bring us to, they''d need to be specific individuals and I''d need to know who they were. To know that, in a political and historical Cherokee context that''s very different from the one I know, I knew I''d need some help. Luckily, one of my brothers is a Cherokee historian! When he was working on his dissertation, he invited me to join him at the Western History Collections through the University of Oklahoma. He taught me how to look at microfiche, and next thing I knew we were reading typed and handwritten letters by Cherokee people who were related to us, which was surreal.

I wanted that for Steph, particularly as she''s detached herself from the past and its people. So I decided that up until the year 1860, my real ancestors would stand in as the basis for Steph''s ancestors. My family has a complicated relationship to assimilation and the Indian Removal Act, so lending Steph a research-based Cherokee history didn''t make for any simple answers. But it raised questions. And, importantly, it added Steph to a conversation that had begun long before her. (And a conversation I''m still having with my brothers!) What is your approach to writing? Did you have a method for keeping track of all the characters'' voices and perspectives? The truest answer to this is that it was just hard. It''s hard to learn how to write a novel and it''s hard to figure out how to put different characters and their many needs and voices together. So when I say that I was working on this novel from ages twenty-two to thirty-four, it was far from what I''d imagined.

I thought I would write a draft and continue to revise that same draft. Really, I wrote many drafts of many different stories, but they all fell into this larger project. For example: there was a novel that followed Della into old age, and a novel that let Steph and Della fall in love in the very far future. It wasn''t until March 2020, when I was twenty-nine years old and had pretty much given up on this novel, that I returned to the project and believed in it. Everything since then has been a revision of that early pandemic draft. That being said, my process has stayed the same! Despite.