Writing a love letter: 'Shoot the Moon' travels through time and space in a dazzling debut

“Shoot the Moon” is a dazzling debut novel from the pen of Isa Arsén.

It showcases Arsén’s creativity as a writer of original prose, of realistic, vulnerable characters, of palpable sentiments of love and loss.

The novel’s prologue introduces the reader to the central character, Annie Fisk. The year is 1966, and Annie, a secretary, is chatting with Norm Hale, a rocket scientist, at a Christmas party at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. They kiss. Twice.

Annie and Norm meet again, marry. Their love collides with science.

The novel moves back and forth over four decades. The earliest year is 1948, at the start of Annie’s formative years in Santa Fe. An only child, Annie is Daddy’s girl. They have a closer familial tie than Annie and her Mother have.

Though it’s post-World War II, Daddy isn’t home much. He’s toiling, secretly, at the lab on “the bomb.”

As little as she knows of his job, 8-year-old Annie tells Daddy she wants to do what he does when she grows up. Daddy insists Annie do more than what he does.

He speculates, “Well, they’ll probably aim to get someone to the moon and back within your lifetime. Think you can figure out how to get to the moon?”

Why go to the moon, she asks. His reply: “Same reason humans do anything impossible — just to see if we can.”

That’s the igniting spark for Annie’s curiosity about the universe and for the plot development.

Daddy’s death registers as her first great loss. A few years later, in 1958, Annie is at college in San Antonio, Texas, She takes a shine to Evelyn, a fellow student. They kiss, they touch. They small-talk. They smoke dope.

Annie describes her attraction to women as “a comfort to me, a safety despite the taboo.”

Meanwhile, Annie’s intellectual curiosity expands and deepens. A college professor revs up in her a strong interest in astronomy and physics. The more she studies the texts and assignments from Professor Laitz, the more knowledge she wants to absorb. As Annie tells it, “I wanted to know every single way in which the universe made itself work, the ways life stumbled into happening, the trajectory of randomness.”

Noticing Annie’s scientific ardor, Laitz asks if she’s thinking about a career. He persists. “If you could do anything … what would it be?” Her answer is “NASA.”

In other words, rocket science.

Annie is watching a TV show on which the Apollo Mission astronauts are interviewed. She decides these men are in the space mission program because of their military service. She, on the other hand, wants in because she’s driven to know all there is to know about outer space.

Following Laitz’s advice, Annie gets her foot in the door as a secretary at the Manned Space Center. Annie toughs it out in this man’s world. She’s rewarded with a promotion to computer programmer after finding — and fixing — a repeated error in Norm’s calculations.

She and Norm work closely on an anomaly that may affect the upcoming Apollo 11 mission to put a man on the moon. After her promotion, the two of them refocus their work on the anomaly that Annie deems critical. Her proposal is approved, though it has to be pursued in the shadows of the NASA mission.

Within the story is the sci-fi/scientific notion of space-traveling, initially with two imaginary characters who appear to Annie.

A pregnant, widowed Annie reunites with Evelyn in Marfa, Texas. That brings the reader to the concluding year of 1978. Annie and her now 8-year-old young daughter experience their own space-traveling.

Arsén’s flair for the language is a marvel. Examples: “The tomatoes burst ripe as summer itself against my tongue.” “… her smile pretty as a magician model’s ….” And visualize the immense moral weight Arsén invokes in this sentence: “Like the sands of the Jornada del Muerto, of Trinity blown to glass, to terror, to ruin itself — become death, destroyer of worlds, my father had known sin and it never let him be.”

The book’s title, “Shoot the Moon,” means striving to get something that is difficult to attain. So appropriate for describing Annie’s journeys as a scientist, a woman and a mother.

The author thinks of the novel as a love letter to New Mexico and a love letter to Texas. Arsén, an audio engineer who lives in San Antonio, Texas, spent many summers with family in Santa Fe.