Rocket Boys (also known as October Sky) is the first memoir in a series of three, by Homer Hickam, Jr. It is a story of growing up in a mining town, and a boy's pursuit of amateur rocketry in a coal mining town. It won the W.D. Weatherford Award in 1998, the year of its release. Today, it is one of the most often picked community/library reads in the United States. It is also studied in many school systems around the world. Rocket Boys was followed by The Coalwood Way (2000) and Sky of Stone (2002).
Rocket Boys was made into a film in 1999, titled October Sky (an anagram of "Rocket Boys"). The book was then re-published as October Sky shortly afterwards.
Read more about Rocket Boys: Plot Summary, Characters
Famous quotes containing the words rocket and/or boys:
“Along a parabola life like a rocket flies,
Mainly in darkness, now and then on a rainbow.”
—Andrei Voznesensky (b. 1933)
“We have dancing ... from soon after sundown until a few minutes after nine o’clock.... Occasionally the boys who play the female partners in the dances exercise their ingenuity in dressing to look as girlish as possible. In the absence of lady duds they use leaves, and the leaf-clad beauties often look very pretty and always odd enough.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)