
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.