Liftoff!

Today is the official publication date for Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11. The reviews, in order of appearance, are excerpted below:

Booklist (starred review):
“Forty years after NASA’s Apollo 11 mission first landed astronauts on the moon, this striking nonfiction picture book takes young readers along for the ride.... Written with quiet dignity and a minimum of fuss, the main text is beautifully illustrated with line-and-wash artwork that provides human interest, technological details, and some visually stunning scenes. The book’s large format offers plenty of scope for double-page illustrations, and Floca makes the most of it, using the sequential nature of picture books to set up the more dramatic scenes and give them human context.... A handsome, intelligent book with a jacket that’s well-nigh irresistible.”

School Library Journal (starred review):
“Large in trim size as well as topic, this stirring account retraces Apollo 11's historic mission in brief but precise detail, and also brilliantly captures the mighty scope and drama of the achievement.”

Kirkus Reviews (starred review):
“A dizzying, masterful command of visual pacing combines with an acute sense of verbal rhythms to provide a glorious account of the Apollo 11 mission, one that stands as the must-buy in this crowded lunar season.... Floca’s language, in one of his longer texts, is equally gorgeous.... Humor lightly applied provides the necessary grounding touch to this larger-than-human endeavor without ever taking away its sense of moment. The front endpapers give detail-loving readers diagrams and a pictorial chronology; the back endpapers contain a brief history of NASA’s lunar program. Breathtaking, thrilling and perfect.”

And hot off the Internet is word that there will be a starred review in the May/June issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

All books are labors of love, but making Moonshot meant more to me — and asked more of me — than any work I’ve done so far. I am grateful for the support the book has received every step of the way from everyone at Atheneum, and I am proud, relieved, appreciative, and happy at the reception the book is receiving.

I hope you’ll find a copy somewhere and that you’ll enjoy it!