Compelling and thought-provoking...but with an annoying main character. Can't have it all.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

More of a 3.5, but the ending helped. Also, even though I didn't really like the main characters, I found the story and writing compelling. Also, it's told chronologically! Huzzah!

From a young age, Steph knows that she wants to go to space. She's being raised by a single mother in Oklahoma; a Cherokee, she's focused on this quest while those around her deal with their history, both as Native Americans and their own personal journeys and the history of their specific people. The book is mostly told from Steph's point of view, but we get a bunch of chapters from that of her college girlfriend, and we later have interspersed emails and social media posts from others to get glimpses into their lives.

Steph is laser-focused on her goal; it makes it hard for the people around her (from a friend/love interest: "We eat snacks, I talk, and you sit here giving me absolutely nothing, like you're in the witness protection program" and "You're funny. At least, I've decided you are. You're cute. You mean well, I think") and it makes her hard to like ("It's good to be well-rounded, I thought, when you are a person with no dreams"), though her discipline is admirable. She does eventually grow, but it takes the vast, vast majority of the book...and a shark attack, which is about the last thing I expected in this book 

We also get a lot of Kayla, Steph's sister. Young Kayla is into art and is very interested in her Native ancestry. She doesn't have the dreams Steph does and lives a completely different life. A lot of the book is dealing with your personal history, about how Steph and Kayla's mother tells the story of their ancestors, and gave me a lot to reflect on, about how we think of our ancestors:

• "He said to stop thinking of our tribe as its history"
• "Kayla still looked to our ancestors as fighters, people whose every complexity could be forgiven in their fight to survive"
• "...these people didn't live for you to use them for whatever point you're out to make. If we met them today, I think we'd disagree on a lot of things"
• "I've been trying to learn more about them, to understand them not as the ancestors, but as people"

This hit particularly close to home for me; I recently visited the house of an ancestor who was killed on the first day of the American Revolution, a story I knew. When my husband and I got a tour of his house, we learned that evidence shows that an enslaved person lived there, too. I'm still grappling with that.

So while I didn't like Steph, I liked a lot of what she was dealing with. She never grappled with being gay, per se, but there was a lot of trying to figure out if other people were gay and the period where civil unions were a thing but gay marriage wasn't, and how she felt about that. (It also gave us this quote from Steph's mom: "I know haircuts like that are sacred to the lesbian people.") I liked seeing her relationship with her heritage in contrast with her sister's, and how both seemed extreme, if in opposite ways. Dealing with our own stories and traumas and history was central to the book.

This is particularly true for Della, Steph's college girlfriend. Her parents (or maybe just father?) was Native American, but her birth mother gave her up for adoption, and she spent her earliest years caught up in court battles between her adoptive, Mormon parents and her Indian father. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and Della winds up spending a lot of time grappling with her religion and upbringing and beliefs and family, and what they all mean to her. I found her story compelling, possibly moreso than Steph's. I was very very happy to have a check-in with Della late in the book, to see where she wound up.

I also liked Steph and Della's college story, spending time with NASA (the Native American student group at their school; Steph's mother's reaction to the name was perfection) and seeing how everyone there interacted, with their different backgrounds. What about their college experience was like mine, if a few years later, what was different?

So while the book (i.e., Steph herself) was frustrating, it's a book worth picking up. It goes some unexpected places and I'm bummed there are scenes we didn't get to see and it gave me a lot to think about.

Thank you to Avid Reader Press and NetGalley for the advance copy in exchange for my opinion.