Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11

by Brian Floca, Brian Floca (Illustrator)

Overview

Simply told, grandly shown, here is the flight of Apollo 11. Here for a new generation of readers and explorers are the steady astronauts, clicking themselves into gloves and helmets, strapping themselves into sideways seats. Here are their great machines in all their detail and monumentality, the ROAR of rockets, and the silence of the Moon. Here is a story of adventure and discovery — a story of leaving and returning during the summer of 1969, and a story of home, seen whole, from far away.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416950462
Publisher:	Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books
Publication date:	04/07/2009
Series:	Richard Jackson Books (Atheneum Hardcover)
Pages:	48
Product dimensions:	10.70(w) x 11.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Lexile:	AD830L (what's this?)
Age Range:	6 - 11 Years

About the Author

Brian Floca is the author and illustrator of Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11, a Robert F. Sibert Honor Book and a New York Times Best Illustrated Book; Lightship, also a Sibert Honor Book; The Racecar Alphabet, an ALA Notable Children’s Book, and Locomotive, which explores America’s first transcontinental railroad. He has illustrated Avi’s Poppy Stories, Kate Messner’s Marty McGuire novels, and Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan’s Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring, a Sibert Honor Book and winner of the Orbis Pictus Award. You can visit him online at BrianFloca.com.

Brian Floca is the author and illustrator of Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11, a Robert F. Sibert Honor Book and a New York Times Best Illustrated Book; Lightship, also a Sibert Honor Book; The Racecar Alphabet, an ALA Notable Children’s Book, and Locomotive, which explores America’s first transcontinental railroad. He has illustrated Avi’s Poppy Stories, Kate Messner’s Marty McGuire novels, and Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan’s Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring, a Sibert Honor Book and winner of the Orbis Pictus Award. You can visit him online at BrianFloca.com.

Editorial Reviews

…while the illustrations speak eloquently of the wonders of science, the free verse text positively sings. Within a single sentence, facts (the rocket is 30 stories high and weighs 6 million pounds) and artistry ("a tower full of fuel and fire") keep company. In this beautiful amalgam of science and poetry, words, set free from gravity, merge into images that reverberate and soar.
—The Washington Post

Kristi Jemtegaard

In watercolors, ink and acrylics, Floca lays out colorfully and succinctly how the Apollo 11 mission unfolded. Crew and machinery are equally brought to life.
—The New York Times

Julie Just

Floca's rendition of Apollo 11's journey to the moon is as poetic as it is historically resonant. The first page offers a quiet meditation: "High above/ there is the Moon,/ cold and quiet,/ no air, no life,/ but glowing in the sky," followed by the astronauts preparing for the voyage and then a dramatic liftoff ("The rocket is released!"). Once in space, the lunar module, Eagle-"a stranger ship, more bug than bird,/ a black and gold and folded spider"-locks onto the Columbia. The subdued illustrations hold an undercurrent of emotion (as a family hears the report that the Eagle has landed safely, the father wipes his eyes with awe and relief). A stirring depiction of a momentous event. Ages 4-7. (Apr.)

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Publishers Weekly

Gr 2-5

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. Rendered in delicate lines and subtly modulated watercolors, the eye-filling illustrations allow viewers to follow the three astronauts as they lumber aboard their spacecraft for the blastoff and ensuing weeklong journey ("...there's no fresh air outside the window;/after a week this small home will not smell so good./This is not why anyone/wants to be an astronaut"). They split up so that two can make their famous sortie, and then reunite for the return to "the good and lonely Earth,/glowing in the sky." Floca enhances his brief, poetic main text with an opening spread that illustrates each component of Apollo 11 , and a lucid closing summary of the entire Apollo program that, among other enlightening facts, includes a comment from Neil Armstrong about what he said versus what he meant to say when he stepped onto the lunar surface. Consider this commemoration of the first Moon landing's 40th anniversary as a spectacular alternative for younger readers to Catherine Thimmesh's Team Moon (Houghton, 2006).-John Peters, New York Public Library

School Library Journal

The newly revised Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 is even more glorious than the original…New lines of text retain the grace and clarity of Floca's economical free verse while adding information, such as the tricky logistics of spacecraft rendezvous. And as before, Floca's artwork remains an extraordinary delight for a reader of any age. Like the astronauts' own photographs, his expansive, heart-stopping images convey the unfathomable beauty of both the bright, dusty moon and the blue jewel of Earth.

The New York Times Book Review - Gillian Engberg

Telling the Apollo 11 story more fully while recognizing the contributions of women and minorities, here's an engaging, enlightening, and timely new edition of this visually stunning book.

starred review Booklist

★ 2019-02-13

A fresh, expanded edition of Floca's top-drawer tribute to the first moon landing, which won a Sibert honor in 2010.

New here is an early nod to the "thousands of people" who worked behind the scenes to make the mission a success (a nod echoed in the closing recap) and a much-enlarged account of Apollo 11's return flight to Earth. Both include new art: For the first, a set of vignettes clearly depicts women and people of color playing prominent roles (including a recognizable Katherine Johnson), and for the second, the 2009 original's two pages grow to eight, climaxed by a close-up of the command module Columbia's furious, fiery re-entry. The narrative, along with having expanded to match, has been lightly tweaked throughout but remains as stately and dramatic as ever: "But GO, GO, says Mission Control: / ‘Eagle, Houston. You're GO for landing.' / Far from home and far from help, / still steady, steady the astronauts fly, / as time and fuel are running out." Minor changes in other illustrations and added or clarified details in the text add further life and luster to a soaring commemoration of our space program's most spectacular achievement. This is the rare revised edition that adds enough new material to demand purchase.

Still essential reading, more so than ever for being broader in scope and more balanced of presentation than the original. (Informational picture book. 7-12)

Kirkus Reviews