#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The "nostalgic and entertaining memoir" (People), originally published as Rocket Boys, that inspired the Universal Pictures film.

"A message of hope in an age of cynicism. . . . Perhaps we all have something to learn from a half-dozen boys who dared to reject all limitations . . . and resolved to send dreams roaring to the sky."--The San Diego Union-Tribune

It was 1957, the year Sputnik raced across the Appalachian sky, and the small town of Coalwood, West Virginia, was slowly dying.

Faced with an uncertain future, Homer Hickam nurtured a dream: to send rockets into outer space. The introspective son of the mine's superintendent and a mother determined to get him out of Coalwood forever, Homer fell in with a group of misfits who learned not only how to turn scraps of metal into sophisticated rockets but how to sustain their hope in a town that swallowed its men alive.

As the boys began to light up the tarry skies with their flaming projectiles and dreams of glory, Coalwood, and the Hickams, would never be the same.

With the grace of a natural storyteller, NASA engineer Homer Hickam paints a warm, vivid portrait of the harsh West Virginia mining town of his youth, evoking a time of innocence and promise, when anything was possible. Lush and lyrical, October Sky is a uniquely American memoir: A powerful, luminous story of coming of age at the end of the 1950s, of a mother's love and a father's fears, and of growing up and getting out.

Author: Homer Hickam
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Dell
Published: 02/16/1999
Series: Coalwood #1
Pages: 448
Weight: 0.5lbs
Size: 6.80h x 4.10w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9780440235507

Accelerated Reader:
Reading Level: 5.9
Point Value: 21
Interest Level: Upper Grade
Quiz #/Name: 35205 / Rocket Boys/October Sky


Award: 2001 Virginia Readers Choice Award Nominee - High School


Review Citation(s):
Booklist 09/15/1999 pg. 251

About the Author
Homer H. Hickam, Jr., was born and raised in Coalwood, West Virginia. The author of Torpedo Junction, a Military History Book of the Month Club selection, as well as numerous articles for such publications as Smithsonian Air and Space and American History Illustrated, he is a NASA payload training manager for the International Space Program and lives in Huntsville, Alabama.