Dear Reader,
This book began in my first year of college. Back home, my sense of who I was had been shaped by the daily presence of the people I loved and the stories they’d passed down to me. It’s easy to know who you are, I thought, and where you come from, when your childhood bedroom was shared with a beloved grandmother. But then what?
One day, I was sitting in a classroom with a group of fellow Native students. We were all from different tribal nations, but the conversation kept returning to our people and the ways they’d lived in the past. For me, when I thought about Cherokee identity, I couldn’t help but base it in a foundational story I’d been told as a child: the Trail of Tears. In other words, I thought about loss. An imagined purity of what we had been, and each year moved farther from. But a sophomore in the room pushed back. He talked about our futures, and the countless options ahead of us. Every possible life. If one of you were to become an astronaut, he said, that too would be part of the story of your people.
I’ve thought about that sentence countless times in the years since. Years I spent writing this book, and navigating change, and learning about the best and the worst of the world as it stands today. And, importantly, thinking about the future. What can we hope for, for ourselves? For one another, and for the people who come after us?
At one point, I thought this was a story about straightforward ambition. One woman’s desire to get to the moon. But that woman was not alone. And early on, this book announced itself as a family saga. It became a story of mothers and daughters, and a story of sisters. It became a coming-of-age novel and a love story and a book about the many ways we find and build our families. It became a book about our ancestors and our descendants, and the stories we tell in the space between them.
At its heart, this is a book about belonging, and belief in our shared future: that we may choose—person by person—to show up for one another. I hope that, when you finish this book, you’re left with a feeling of connection. To your family, your people, and humankind. Wherever we come from, and wherever we may go.
Thank you for the great kindness of reading my first novel. I carried it with me from the moment my parents dropped me off in my dorm room—I’d felt annoyed by their presence and then cried when they were gone. I carried it through the unexpected changes that come with growing up, and the moments I felt lost. I finished it, finally, on the night my daughter was born. It was the book I needed to read in those years before her, to steady myself with hope for whatever comes next. I hope it can be that for you, too.
Yours, sincerely,
Eliana
