October Sky is the first memoir in a series of four, by American engineer Homer Hickam Jr. originally published in 1998 as Rocket Boys. Later editions were published under the title October Sky as a tie-in to the 1999 film adaptation.
It is a story of growing up in a mining town, and a boy's pursuit of amateur rocketry in a coal mining town. The book 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. October Sky was followed by The Coalwood Way (2000), Sky of Stone (2002), and Carrying Albert Home (2015).
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.
Contents
Plot summary
Homer "Sonny" Hickam Jr. lives in a small coal mining town in West Virginia named Coalwood. Sonny, after seeing the Russian satellite Sputnik, decides to join the American team of rocket engineers called the Missile Agency when he graduates from school. (Note: In the book Rocket Boys, the main character is always called Sonny. In the movie October Sky, he is called Homer.)
Sonny's older brother, Jim Hickam, excels at football and expects to get a college football scholarship. Sonny, however, is terrible at sports and has no special skill that would get him "out of Coalwood". Sonny's mother is afraid that he will have to work in the mines after high school.
Sonny's first attempt at rocketry (which occurred when he was 14) consists of a flashlight tube and model airplane body as a casing. It is fueled by flash powder from old cherry bombs. It explodes violently, destroying his mother's fence. After that, Sonny enlists the help of Quentin Wilson, Roy Lee Cooke, Sherman Siers, Jimmy "O'Dell" Carroll, and Billy Rose to help build rockets while forming the BCMA (Big Creek Missile Agency). Their first real rocket, powered by black powder, is named Auk 1 (This is an allusion to the great auk, which is a flightless seabird that became extinct in the mid-19th century). Auk 1 flies six feet before the solder melts, and the nozzle, a washer, separates from the casement.
They call themselves "Rocket Boys" and call the place where they are launching their rockets "Cape Coalwood", in honor of Cape Canaveral. The Rocket Boys enjoy mixed success during their three-year rocket launching campaign (1957 to 1960). They employ several fuel mixtures including rocket candy and a mixture called "zincoshine", which is composed of zinc dust and sulfur, along with alcohol from moonshine, supplied by a local bootlegger, as a binder for the mixture. They launch a total of 35 rockets, all sequentially numbered Auk I–XXXI. (There are five different Auk XXIIs.) They also win a National Science Fair gold medal for their rockets and project titled "A Study of Amateur Rocketry Techniques."
Characters
Homer "Sonny" Hickam Jr. is the author and narrator of the memoir. He is 8 years old at the beginning of the story, but is in high school for most of the book. He serves as the leader of the Rocket Boys. He is nearsighted, wears glasses, and plays in the school band.
Elsie Hickam is Homer Hickam's wife and the mother of Jim and "Sonny" Hickam. She has a tense relationship with her husband through most of the story. She is supportive of Sonny's rocket building, and often finds herself at odds with her husband, Homer Sr., about the rocket building. She says to Sonny: "Don't blow yourself up." She works on a mural of Myrtle Beach throughout the memoir.
Homer Hickam Sr. is Elsie Hickam's husband, and the father of Jim and "Sonny" Hickam. He is the hard-headed mine foreman in Coalwood. He takes his job very seriously, going out of his way to help miners in distress. He is almost always at odds with the union leader, John Dubonnet, who dated Elsie when they were all in high school together. Homer Sr. seems to not care about Sonny's affairs as much as he does Jim's; Sonny points this out in the book much to Homer Sr.'s chagrin. He has a spot on his lung that is the common miner's disease, black lung (Coal Workers' Pneumoconiosis), but refuses to quit work, although most men who are discovered to have this illness are forced into retirement, but allowed to stay in Coalwood.
Jim Hickam is Homer Hickam Jr.'s older brother, and the son of Elsie and Homer Hickam. He is a star athlete, which leads to him having several conflicts with "Sonny" over how Homer seems to favor Jim over "Sonny". He dates the girl Sonny is in love with, Dorothy Plunk, but later dumps her like he does with many of his girlfriends.
Quentin Wilson is one of the more intelligent members of the Rocket Boys, the one who does the most math. Quentin carries a suitcase stuffed with books wherever he goes and finds excuses to get out of gym class. He is excitable and often confounds the other members and townspeople with his advanced vocabulary.
Jimmy "O'Dell" Carroll is small and excitable, the most emotional member of the group. His father drives the town garbage truck, allowing O'Dell access to many useful items, frequently scrounged to further the group's efforts. He is always scheming of ways of making money, from the failed iron scrap attempt—which took an entire summer, yielded a net loss of one dollar, not counting the destruction of borrowed equipment and almost killing Sonny—to the profitable harvesting of ginseng.