Shoot the Moon

August 1, 2023
Time is fractured in this story of a woman's life as a child, college student, and 20-something set against the development of the atomic bomb and efforts to land the first man on the moon. When Annie Fisk was a child growing up in New Mexico, she had a best friend, Diana, who would appear and disappear in her backyard. A number of small trinkets appeared and disappeared in the same way. As Annie grew up, she decided her friend must have been imaginary, and she never told her mother or her father--a physicist working on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos--about it. After her father's death and her graduation from high school, Annie headed to college in San Antonio, where she met and fell in love with Evelyn, a fellow college student with dreams of being a painter. But, drawn by an imaginary thread, Annie leaves Evelyn after graduation to move to Houston, with the goal of working for NASA. And she does--starting as a secretary, and then moving into programming. What begins as a straightforward story veers into science fiction territory almost unexpectedly as Annie discovers a wormhole and begins to research and test the implications of that finding with a colleague. Explorations of love, loss, science, and the edges of the universe and what is--and is not--possible in the space-time continuum collide in this story; it's reminiscent of the thoughtfulness, matter-of-fact science, and female strength of Connie Willis' well-known time traveling series beginning with Doomsday Book (1992) as well as the world portrayed in Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures (2016). A delightful and surprising story of a woman drawn through life by curiosity.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 14, 2023
Arsén’s innovative debut novel combines mathematical principles with time travel as it traces one woman’s path from scientist’s daughter to NASA programmer. Annie Fisk, drawn to numbers since childhood, follows in the footsteps of her father—a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.Mex. and died when she was only 15—and majors in physics and astronomy in college. She lands a job in the secretarial pool at the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston in 1967 and, after correcting some errors made by Norm Hale, a navigator working on the Apollo, is promoted to a programmer. A romantic relationship with Norm develops, and one day, when Annie’s searching for lost paperwork, she stumbles onto a wormhole into another dimension that seems strangely connected to her own past. Tragedy ensues when Norm volunteers to be a human subject to enter the wormhole, despite Annie’s objections. Afterward, Annie moves on from NASA, reuniting with Evelyn, her college girlfriend and a budding artist, but continues her research into wormholes—a legacy she hopes to pass on to her daughter, Diana. Arsén expertly navigates the back-and-forth of the story’s time-travel events, threading them into the highlights of women’s scientific achievements. Readers who relish strong female leads will be riveted. Agent: Chris Bucci, Aevitas Creative Management.

September 1, 2023
Ars�n's moving first novel tells the story of Annie Fisk, a bisexual woman who went after what she wanted in terms of love and career ambitions despite the many inhibiting factors facing women in the 1960s. Readers see Annie during important milestones in her life, starting at age eight in her childhood home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, then to her studying physics and astronomy in Texas, and culminating in finding work as a secretary at NASA where she meets her future husband, Norman. She boldly helps him out by correcting his navigational calculations for the Apollo space mission. As she attempts to shatter the glass ceiling at NASA, an anomaly at the space center pushes Annie to rethink her past as she ruminates on her father's shocking death, her strained relationship with her mother, and the female lover she abandoned in her quest to pursue her dream to be part of something big. The strange discovery provides a surprising and dramatic twist that connects the multiple time lines and provides much food for thought.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.