October Sky -- Homer Hickam, Paperback

The true story, originally published as Rocket Boys, that inspired the Universal Pictures film.

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.

Author: Homer Hickam
Publisher: Dell
Published: 02/16/1999
Pages: 448
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
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: Virginia Readers Choice Award - Nominee

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.