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)
“This was the merriest old man that we had ever seen, and one of the best preserved. His style of conversation was coarse and plain enough to have suited Rabelais. He would have made a good Panurge. Or rather he was a sober Silenus, and we were the boys Chromis and Mnasilus, who listened to his story.... There was a strange mingling of past and present in his conversation, for he had lived under King George, and might have remembered when Napoleon and the moderns generally were born.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)