Publisher's Weekly Review
Not really a sequel to Hickam's first memoir, Rocket Boys (which was made into the successful movie, October Sky, and dealt primarily with his gang of misfit friends and their inventive, adventurous exploits) this book, set around Christmas 1959, is a study of the town of Coalwood and how a fast-moving world affects a small community resistant to change and the introspective teenage boy in its midst. Hickman's reading is flawless. His voice and perspectiveÄas a man looking back on his childhoodÄconvincingly conveys experience and a reminiscent tone, while at the same time sounding so full of youthful exuberance that listeners will be certain they hear the voice of teenage Homer himself. Coalwood, W.Va., is a coal-mining town. Homer Hickam Sr., the author's father, is the superintendent of the mine and resented by the workers. To his children, he is a formidable man, and his imaginative second son, Homer Jr., aka "Sonny," obsessed with the 1950s space race, does not want to follow in his father's black, dusty footprints. With Christmas fast approaching, the tension in the town grows as layoffs threaten miners' jobs, until Sonny's father takes a huge risk to save them and the town's livelihood. Simultaneous release with the Dell hardcover (Forecasts, Sept. 18). (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Hickams 1950s West Virginian coal-town story ( Rocket Boys , 1998) continues: a polished memoir of a roughhewn place seen through his eyes as a perceptive, questing teenager. Not exactly Versailles to begin with, Coalwood slid into outright misery when Hickam was a boy. Once a benign company townprosperous, safe, paternalit was sold to a steel conglomerate not long after the miners formed a union. A kind of winter of the soul then descended upon Coalwood, which was now just another item on the ledger that had to show a profit. Suddenly, the miners had to buy their houses (or get out), forget about medical treatments, increase their production (with no expansion of manpower), and underwrite all town activities themselves. Of course, as the author explains, these had been the very ties that bound Coalwood together. For the first time, hunger came to town, and Hickams father, the mine superintendent, felt each new insult from the steel company as a blow to the solar plexus. Unlike the authors earlier memoir, which centered on the rocket club he belonged to and mined the rocket metaphor as relentlessly as the town dug coal, this one is more diffuse. A number of strains play themselves out against the background malaise: the mothers desire to flee Coalwood, the little cruelties of small-town life balanced by little acts of kindness, the gamble taken in reopening a jinxed shaft, and the authors hurtful relationship with his father (a distant, careworn, black-lunged character). Hickam overdoes the youthful rustic pose, and home truths clog the airwaves (Im sorry you got troubles, Sonny, but thats called life). But in its quiet, sentimental, coming-of-age way, Hickams story is involving, and he paints a nice landscape: Coalwoods houses were jammed between steep, humpbacked mountains packed so close together a boy with a good arm could throw a rock from one hill to the other. And the endinga happy one, all aroundcouldnt be too sweet for Coalwoods deserving townsfolk. A moving saga that (just) steers clear of the nostalgic swamp most hometown memoirs sink into.
Booklist Review
This sequel to Rocket Boys (1998), which Hollywood parlayed into the movie October Sky, continues the author's life story with his senior year in high school, 1959, in the declining West Virginia mining town of Coalwood. The rocket club, featured in the last book, is pushed to the periphery, and the focus shifts to Hickam's teenage problems, which include his parents, girls, and a sadness whose cause he cannot divine. For advice, he consults his rocket-club pals and a minister, improbably named Little Richard, but they offer slight help. This memoir's main theme is the happenings in Coalwood and how they affect the Hickam household. For Coalwood was a coal-company town, and Hickam's father was the boss of the mine, and resented for it. In addition, Hickam's mother suffers a series of social reversals, and the dinner table soon becomes a tense, taciturn arena. The father wants to dig more coal; the mother wants to move away from Coalwood; and Homer wants to take Ginger Dantzler to the Christmas formal dance. Hickam develops these mini-dramas with anecdotes that are by turns lively, pensive, wry, or self-deprecating, yet none combine in a structural way to reach resolution. The memoir simply stops (after an interruption by a vicious crime) with Christmas carols. Although lacking the strong theme (winning a science fair) that lent Rocket Boys its charm, this profile of a town and a time partakes of a gritty nostalgia that will still entrance Hickam's fans. --Gilbert Taylor
Library Journal Review
In this follow-up to his acclaimed Rocket Boys, retired NASA engineer Hickam recounts tensions in his household during his last Christmas before college, even as the Rocket Boys are drafted to help celebrate the holidays with a really big bang. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.