"I had no idea that my hometown was at conflict with itself over its children and that my parents were engaged in a kind of nonviolent struggle over how my brother and I would conduct our lives until I started building and launching rockets. I had no idea that a female might cure a broken heart the same night if it was broken by another girl who was at least morally upright. Furthermore, I was unaware that the addition of a divergent channel may convert the enthalpy reduction in a converging passage into jet kinetic energy. When we constructed our rockets, the other lads found their own truths, but those were mine."
This is the first line in Homer "Sonny" Hickam Jr.'s remarkable book of growing up in coal-mining-dependent Coalwood, West Virginia, where the future was seen more with dread than optimism and coal mining was the only thing that mattered.
After a stellar career at NASA, Hickam looks back on his early years and tells the tale of the lads who would come to represent the hopes and ambitions of the little mining town of Coalwood.
A young guy discovered his destiny in the stars after seeing the Soviet satellite Sputnik launch over the Appalachian sky in 1957. "Sonny" and a few of his pals, including Sherman O'Dell, Quentin Wilson, and Roy Lee Cook, were motivated to begin building and launching the homemade rockets that would fundamentally alter their lives.
The boys learn step by step how to turn scrap into sophisticated rockets that soar miles into the sky, and how to support their dreams as they dare to imagine a life beyond its borders in a town that the postwar boom was passing by, all with the assistance (and sometimes resistance) of a cast of unforgettable characters.
Like Angela's Ashes and Russell Baker's Growing Up before it, Homer Hickam's book Rocket Boys demonstrates how a strong narrative of growing up and escaping, of a mother's love and a father's concerns, can touch readers' hearts and captivate their souls.
Homer Hickam's Rocket Boys is a singularly charming novel that explores universal themes of class, family, coming-of-age, and the excitement of discovery. It is a masterful example of evocative, vivid storytelling.
A Hollywood film called October Sky, starring Chris Cooper, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Laura Dern, was adapted from Rocket Boys in 1999. Rocket Boys may be anagrammed as October Sky. Additionally, it appears in an old-time radio program that describes Sputnik 1's passage across the "October sky." Homer Hickam said that Universal Pictures altered the title to Rocket Boys to appeal to a larger audience after "marketing people at Universal Studios got involved and they just had to change the title because, according to their research, women over thirty would never see a movie titled Rocket Boys." Later on, in an attempt to profit on the buzz around the film, the book was republished under the title October Sky.