Isa Arsén's heartbreaking debut novel, Shoot the Moon, follows one woman's adventures in physics and love in the early years of the U.S. space program. Annie Fisk--daughter of a scientist who worked on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos--has been fascinated by numbers and space since her childhood in Santa Fe. Following her father's death, Annie and her mother grow ever further apart. Annie throws herself into her studies, attending college in San Antonio and finding both academic purpose and her first love. But the pull of NASA is stronger than the attraction of her artist paramour. Annie moves to Houston after graduation, taking a job as a NASA secretary until her talent for calculations catches the eye of her superiors. Shortly after Annie is promoted to programmer, she discovers an anomaly in her office building that will test the limits of both her brain and her heart.
Arsén's narrative shifts back and forth in time, presenting a mosaic of Annie's life: her childhood hours of solitude in the back garden; her heady college years in the company of artists and other students; her time at NASA as a secretary and her growing attraction to a young engineer; and her determination to pursue her own scientific project, despite various obstacles. Arsén asks big questions about love and duty, the human cost of scientific inquiry, and the difficulty of moving on from past trauma--but she also tells a cinematic story of fierce dedication and blazing love. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams