What a fanatstic read. Arsen really created a beautiful story for Annie. The journey she goes on was inspiring and satisfying.

Thank you to PENGUIN GROUP, Putnam, G.P. Putnam's Sons, and NetGalley for providing an eARC for a honest review.

I wish this book didn’t end!!! A wonderful combination of pan/bi representation and science!! The beginning was a bit slow but got better. I’m glad I stuck with it. Excellent debut novel!

Overall I greatly enjoyed this book. I felt that the beginning of the book was a bit slow, but the story picked up about halfway through and was impossible to put down after that. Even though the story is centered around the space race, I feel that the overall story has appeal to many different readers. How the author covered topics such as deeply held grief and lifelong hurt we can unknowingly carry by not facing this grief was perfectly done. For anyone who is looking for a read that covers love, grief, finding oneself, motherhood, and a bit of science thrown into the mix, then Shoot the Moon is the perfect book.

This is a delightful novel that’s masterfully crafted in terms of its timeline, plot, and language. Set amongst the historical background of NASA in the 1960s, it’s the story of a woman who is not only bisexual/pansexual during a homophobic time period, but who is also a woman in STEM. It’s a story about family, love, and the wonders of the universe.

This book straddles the genres of historical fiction and speculative fiction. It’s set during a very real time period, but it contains main characters who are all fictional, albeit who seem to be vaguely inspired by real people who existed, such as NASA’s programmers and scientists. The speculative elements show up in earnest halfway through the book, and they enhance the strangeness and magical nature of the universe.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Annie’s characterization and the plot drew me in, and I loved all the queer love, nerdy flirting, and familial love. There’s certainly some heartbreak in here, but there’s also the joy of letting others into your heart.

Wow, SHOOT THE MOON is a stunning achievement. I absolutely loved this story of love and science. The back and forth chapter structure works well to keep the reader in suspense. The time travel aspect is presented elegantly, and I especially enjoyed Annie as a main character and her relationships with her parents, Evelyn, Norm, and ultimately, Diana. The day to day details at NASA must have taken a ton of research, but the research doesn't show through; instead, the author expertly puts the reader into the scene with all its wonderful and evocative details. Arsén's writing is at a very high level; she has the literary complexity of a multi-layered plot combined with the power to completely immerse the reader in the story's world. An incredible debut, and I look forward to her next book.

I love books with strong women, especially when those women go against everyone who tries to stop them. This book was a rollercoaster from start to finish. I don't think I expected the wormhole element, but I appreciated how it was written. I also appreciate the simple inclusion of queer characters, even when the book was written in a time when it wasn't simple to be queer.

The downside of this book was the pregnancy trope, though I guess it makes sense. I just don't particularly enjoy when a woman who is smart and capable falls head over heals with a powerful man and ends up with a baby she wasn't expecting without that man there to help. Women need to be MORE than just mothers, and when a woman who is more than just that, I don't like to see them reduced to just that.

Let me start with "I didn't want it to end". It was wistful and glorious and heartbreaking and exciting. What a wonderful debut novel.

This was stunning. A deep, bold, and crackling smart debut.

Annie Fisk is a brilliant mathematician working as a secretary for NASA during the Apollo 11 mission until she catches the eye of one of the engineers and is moved to the new programmer unit. And then one night she discovers an anomaly in the back of the programming room that could change our understanding of time and space.

The story moves backwards and forwards in time between Annie as a young girl, as a student in college, and during her time at NASA, and the author deftly switches between these times and the first and third person to reflect the broader themes of time and distance. It's structurally daring, and it works completely.

In the vein of HIDDEN FIGURES and THE GLASS UNIVERSE (but fiction), SHOOT THE MOON is a complex speculative literary novel imbued with physics and math, but also love and loss and trauma. Arsen will break your heart and light all of the neural pathways of your brain on fire. Highly recommend.

I was lucky enough to win an e-ARC of SHOOT THE MOON by Isa Arsén through a Shelf Awareness giveaway. Thanks for the early look, and have a safe and happy summer!

Annie is very good at math, which helps her land a job with NASA during the moon landing. very interesting book.

I went into this book with a lot of excitement because I had been looking for some historical fiction with the Apollo Missions as a backdrop. I think I had something of a Hidden Figures idea in my mind and this wasn’t it at all. So at the end of the day, it was just okay for me.

Annie is a confused young woman with a bit of a sad past. She’s a wiz at math and this helps her to land a job at NASA during the height of the Apollo Missions. A promotion from dictation to programming brings an unexpected discovery that could change the future.

Thanks so much to NetGalley, Penguin Group Putnam and Isa Arsen for a chance to read this before it hits the shelves

3.5 stars rounded up for the outstanding bisexual representation, but I had very mixed feelings about this book.

“Shoot the Moon” is historical fiction set primarily at NASA during the moon landing. It follows the life of Annie, a young woman with a brilliant mind at a time when women had limited career options. Her father was a scientist, too, but worked on the bomb, work that plagued him all his life.

Annie wants to go into rocketry but into space exploration, instead. She breaks into NASA in the secretarial pool and works her way up to programmer. While at NASA she finds herself distracted by a charming navigator named Norman, all while nursing lingering feelings for her first love, her college girlfriend. Annie stumbles into a mystery at NASA, an anomaly in space time.

I thought this would be like Lessons in Chemistry but make it queer but it wasn’t really that. I found the pacing uneven. I didn’t expect the spiciness of the sex scenes either - I love spicy romance and I read a lot of it, but this definitely wasn’t a romance. Does every genre now have to have spice? Anyway. A lot more time was spent on Evie’s relationships than the mystery, which I found the most intriguing part of the book.

I found it confusing to follow how the narrative jumped back and forth between Annie as a child, Annie at college and Annie in present day, and didn’t understand why the childhood Annie passages were written in third person. It starts to come together at the end with ((spoilers)) but I still had questions.

But three cheers for well done bisexual rep showing both m/f and f/f relationships as well as historically accurate depictions of what it was like to be a woman and queer at that time. I also liked the author’s engaging writing style.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance review copy. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I received a free e-arc of this book through Netgalley. This is a story about discovering one's self in several different ways during the 1950s and 60s as a brilliant young woman who wants to work for NASA. I found it interesting and it had some exciting moments, but there is a lot of quiet living between the exciting parts.

This book follows Annie Fisk, the child of a physicist, from childhood through her post-NASA career in 1978. The story is not told chronologically, but skips to different times and places. While I found this distracting at first, I adjusted, and found it added to the charm of the story.

Annie was fascinated with science and space as a young child. She idolized her father, and shared his scientific mind. When her father dies suddenly, she struggles to find a common bond with her mother.

Annie leaves her New Mexico home to attend college in Texas. There she meets her first love, Evelyn, She also develops a strong bond with a professor. Both of these relationships remain significant beyond college.

Annie graduates from college and heads to Houston to work for NASA. There, she blossoms both personally and professionally. She falls in love again, and marries her colleague, Norman.

Annie makes a discovery while NASA is working to send a man to the moon. This discovery could impact space travel. This impacts her life significantly.

This is a beautiful story of a woman’s journey. She blossoms from a lonely child to a brilliant scientist. Although it takes a while, Annie learns to give and receive love freely. She learns to move on from loss, and embrace life.

The ending of this book was a lovely surprise for me. It brought the story together in a way I did not anticipate.

This is Isa Arsén‘s first novel, and it is a winner. Her writing is engaging and the characters are multidimensional. I really loved this book, and look forward to seeing future works from Ms. Arson.

Thank you to NetGalley, Penguin Random House and the author for providing me with an advance copy of this book so I could prepare this review. This book is scheduled to be released in October, 2023.

I had mixed feelings on this one it was a slow start and felt it needed more editing and a more streamlined plot but did like the women in science angle .

Thanks for letting me review this book to Netgalley and publisher

I wish I had liked this book more. I loved the premise, but I struggled really getting into the book. Once I did, I enjoyed the characters and the story, but it took a while.

The Moon has undergone plenty of threats from humankind without this book’s title, but technically this was more of a shoot for the moon sort of thing. As in there is a character who’s obsessed with outer space and NASA and is determined to find her way there—no easy task for a woman back in the day. Fortunately, this daughter of a rocket scientist is brilliant enough to do it. Only once she gets to NASA, she comes across an intriguing and exciting anomaly much closer to home.
She also finds love. And that lamentably proceeds to determine too much of the book’s plot and tone. It might have been an exciting science fiction story but it’s too busy veering into women’s fiction.
There’s also the time jumping, which while justified and plot-consistent, can get to be a lot.
The writing was perfectly decent, especially for a debut. The plotting left something to be desired.
Overall, an intriguing concept somewhat overpowered by estrogen. Both the title and the cover might have used more originality too. A rather quick read. Thanks Netgalley.

Mixed feelings! This was one of my most anticipated reads of the year, and I found it a little disappointing, but the ending saved it. There was much rejoicing and caps-locking in my notes at the big reveal.

This is a puzzle-box time travel novel, like Sea of Tranquility (though not as good IMO) meets Hidden Figures (if Hidden Figures was about a white woman). The final reveal sticks the landing, but many of the other puzzle pieces don’t work as well. There were scenes where I was like “I don’t understand why this scene exists, it seems unnecessary,” and then eventually I realized they were necessary for time-travel plot reasons. Which, fine, but I think a really well-crafted novel of this type would make all the scenes feel relevant from the start, and you would realize later that some of them were relevant for other reasons as well. There were also other puzzle pieces that just didn’t make sense to me or that I didn’t find satisfying.

The other thing that didn’t quite work for me was the book’s approach to queerness. I don’t mean that it’s ~problematic~; this is an artistic rather than political or ethical complaint. There are a number of ways you can write queerness in historical fiction, for example: maximum realism / historical accuracy (think Last Night at the Telegraph Club or The Great Believers); or an explicit alternate history where homophobia doesn’t exist (think To Paradise or You Feel It Just Below the Ribs); or a deliberately handwavey/anachronistic portrayal that’s like “let’s just not really think about homophobia here even though it technically exists” (think The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue or Mrs. Martin’s Incomparable Adventure). I have read and enjoyed all of these different approaches, but this book’s approach didn’t make sense to me.

This book isn’t an alternate history, and it doesn’t ignore homophobia, but nor does it feel realistic. Annie’s social circle includes a man who gets arrested at a gay bar, and a woman who’s disowned by her parents for being a lesbian, so Annie is clearly aware that homophobia can majorly affect your life. And yet, even though her dream is to work at NASA, and even though the book takes place during the years of the Lavender Scare and Executive Order 10450, which led to the firing of thousands of gay federal employees, it never once crosses Annie’s mind that her sexuality could affect her career. And it’s not that the time period is incidental, either—the book explicitly indicates exactly what year each chapter is set in, and at least one real historical event is important to the plot.

Portray homophobia, don’t portray homophobia—I’m open to either. Maybe there were some people in same-sex relationships in the 1960s who didn’t think much about homophobia. But based on everything we know about Annie, it doesn’t make sense for *her* to not think about it.

I loved this book! It has two things that are not represented in books very often - women in science and bi representation. I appreciated both being included! The story is well written, emotional and kept me guessing. I loved every second of it!

Thank you so much for the digital ARC in exchange for my honest review. All opinions expressed are completely my own.

Ok so this book gets like a solid 3.8/5 for me.

This was a relatively quick read for me and while I was able to figure out some of the plot twists, there were some that I didn't catch until the reveal. I love the concept of this novel, and I feel like it was on the right track to follow in the veins of "Lessons in Chemistry" meets "Hidden Figures." but it didn't quite hit the mark.

Annie Fisk is bisexual, but given her inner monologues we get, she is coded more like an aromantic bisexual. None of her relationships with other characters feels full fleshed out, and they feel one sided from the other party. This made some of the romantic and family plotlines a little less believable (especially how "distracted" she claims to get)

HOWEVER, she gets major kudos for being a bad a** lady scientist, who has the guts to speak her mind, but at the same time never actually feels like she achieves her goal of getting to space. With all the time jumps, its takes until about halfway through the book to actually get to NASA and even then, there is not a lot of plot dedicated to her work with Apollo 11. At this point the story goes into what I at first thought was left field, but in reality it was the glue that brought the entire novel full circle. By the end, I was much more able to better appreciate what the overarching themes were.