Is it possible to have the career you want and healthy personal relationships?
There’s a lot more to Eliana Ramage’s book than that, but I felt like that was the main struggle for the main character, Steph.
We first meet Steph as a young girl waiting for her acceptance into a private school that acts as a feeder for NASA, only to find out her mother had hidden her acceptance letter from her until it was too late for her to respond.
Her mother brought Steph and her younger sister, Kayla, to the reservation when they were just a few years old. Kayla doesn’t remember anything of their previous life, but Steph remembers walking around on eggshells when Dad had had too much to drink. She remembers the car accident that preceded their night-long drive to get to the reservation. What actually happened that night is only hinted at until the end of the book, so the reader is kept guessing.
The book follows Steph as she deigns to go to the public school on the rez, grows up, goes to college, and, yes, makes it into the space program.
Along the way, she struggles with her sexuality as she realizes she’s attracted to women and she’s not sure what to do with that knowledge. To be fair, no one knows how to act around a crush when we first start getting them, but the fact that she’s realizing she’s gay in the 1980s and on a reservation, and she doesn’t have great social skills to begin with, all make it that much harder.
When she realized she couldn’t go to the private school she had her heart set on, Steph gave up on ever becoming an astronaut, but somewhere along the way she began to hope again. Maybe it was when she got into college, because she loses no time in taking all the classes she needs to take to be considered for the space program.
She meets and falls in love with another freshman girl who comes from a traditional Mormon family and is engaged to a guy who is off doing his year of service. So when she realizes she’s also in love with Steph, coming out to her family doesn’t go nearly as well for her as it did for Steph. It’s not helped by the fact that Steph isn’t a very good girlfriend.
She doesn’t mean to be a shitty girlfriend, she’s just so wrapped up in her own ambition that she fails to see the dreams other people might have for their own lives, especially when those dreams don’t coincide with her own plans.
Things come to a head when Steph is training for a possible space mission. She and some other candidates get plopped on a mountain in Hawai’i and they’re not supposed to have any contact with the outside world.
Kayla chooses that moment to join a protest of indigenous Hawaiians trying to stop NASA from erecting a telescope on a mountain they consider sacred. It seems calculated to derail Steph’s training, because if she has contact with the outside world, she and her whole team could be disqualified from the space program.
On the other hand, no one tells Steph she has to sneak out at night and join Kayla and her protesters. Yes, she gets caught, and the fact that the captain decided not to report her for it is something I did not believe for a second. As much as I loved Steph, if I had been in the captain’s shoes, there’s no way I would have given her a second chance.
That’s kind of a theme throughout Steph’s life: she keeps getting second chances even when she doesn’t deserve them.
I mentioned the car accident when Steph and Kayla were kids, and that does get explained after Kayla finds an obituary for their dad who just recently died. They had all assumed he died in the car crash. Turns out he survived, and while the car crash gets mentioned in the obituary, none of them do, which is when Steph and Kayla’s mom explains her side of the story and how she assumed he hadn’t survived the crash.
Woven into it is the story of how their mom got kicked out of her parent’s house when she got pregnant as a teenager, leading her to move in with a guy who was no good for her or the kids, but what choice did she have?
It wasn’t until she moved back to the reservation that she felt she was where she belonged, which is why she’s so determined to keep Steph home with her as long as she can. She’s so deep in her own trauma, she can’t see the trauma she’s inflicting on her daughters, which also pretty well describes Steph’s myopia throughout the book.
Despite what a frustrating character Steph was, I also fell under her spell and found myself rooting for her even when I was screaming at her for the poor decisions she was making.
This book is just so beautifully written I couldn’t help but fall in love with it and with its problematic main character.