Rocket Boys is Homer Hickam Jr‘s autobiography (the first of three, to be exact). It was made into the movie October Sky.

Plot:
Sonny [actually Homer] Hickam lives in Coalwood, a small mining town. His father Homer is the foreman, his mother Elsie a frustrated housewife, dreaming of faraway places. Elsie wants Sonny to be able to get out of Coalwood, but unlike his brother Jim who is a football star, Sonny shows no special talents. That is until Sonny and a couple of friends blow up the backyard fence in their attempt to create a rocket (inspired by the launch of Sputnik). From then on, Sonny is obsessed with the idea of conquering space. He founds the Big Creek Missile Agency and they start building rockets in earnest.

Rocket Boys is a nice read. It’s sentimental, sometimes a little judgemental and it’s probably a great nostalgic experience for people who have actually lived through the space race. For people who haven’t (like me), it’s still a nostalgic experience, though not a great one.

I read this book for my grandma – she got it from a friend of hers as a present and didn’t want to read it myself and I made the mistake of being mildly interested (and capable of reading the English original) and suddenly I was responsible to read it and report to my grandma, so she could tell her friend she read it. [And I hope that said friend doesn’t read this blog. I mean, I don’t think she does, since not even my grandma does, but you never know.]

Anyway, if that hadn’t been the case, and I hadn’t had that slight obligation at the back of my head, I probably wouldn’t have finished this book. It’s not so bad that I absolutely could not read it, but it’s only nice and it drags a bit. You’d think that 40 years between experiencing everything and writing about it would make Hickam a) forget an awful lot of details and b) realize what was important. Neither is the case, though and so the book is about 100 pages too long for its own good.

It’s amazing how driven these kids were and it’s a good story to tell. The nostalgia factor was cranked way up high. I started to feel nostalgic, though I was born almost 30 years after this book takes place. At the same time, he made me shake my head sometimes, especially when he told us about how great his education was and how he was able to read Tom Sawyer and understand everything – and you could practically hear him shouting that everything was going downhill and that kids today are so stupid and undereducated… But it was never too bad.

Rocket Boys is a fine read that could have done with a bit of shortening and is probably best enjoyed in its movie form (I haven’t seen the movie [yet] but it stars Jake Gyllenhaal, so that’s a clear win).