October Sky; Pages 1-70

Summary: Coalwood, West Virginia, is where Homer ‘Sonny’ Hickam, Jr. resides. Coalwood is a town that is mostly known for its coal mine. Most of the men who live in Coalwood work at the mine. And, if a man doesn’t work at the mine, he basically doesn’t have anywhere else to word. Therefore, he will be forced out to move out of Coalwood, and his family as well if he has one.

Sonny is fourteen at the beginning of the novel, and he lives only a few hundred yards away form the mine of Coalwood. He lives with his father, Homer Hickam, the superintendent at the mine, Elsie Hickam, his mother, and Jim Hickam, his brother football star.

Sonny has been in an odd situation for most of his life, and his mother seems to be the only one helping him with his dreams. Though, Sonny isn’t the weirdest guy in town because he does have friends: O’Dell, Roy Lee, Sherman, and Tim. Though, Tim moved one day with his mother and Sonny never heard form him again. The group’s size has decreased, but their friendship still grew as the days went by.

One day Elsie woke Sonny up and told him to hurry up because she wanted him to hear something. So, Sonny got ready with haste and did as his mother told him. When he went to the kitchen where his breakfast waited for him, he heard something on the radio: Sputnik! Sputnik was a satellite which the Russians have launched into space. This was a great deal at the time because the Russians have won the race to launch a satellite into space. Though the Russians won the race, it didn’t mean that the Americans were not going to try and catch up.

After Sputnik was a success for Russia, and Sonny heard how the U.S. was now trying finish their satellite as fast as possible, he became interesting into building rockets. With the help of his friends O’Dell, Sherman, and Roy Lee, he built a small rocket for the first time and decided to launch it by his mothers fence. In their desire to be in the space race, they made their first rocket out of a plastic flashlight. They made a hole in the bottom and put in it, and lit it up. For one, rockets are much more complicated than just putting a hole in the bottom of a cylinder and putting fuel in it. Their hope to build the next successful rocket failed. Not only did they fail, but they tore apart Sonny’s mother’s fence as well.

She wasn’t as mad as he thought though because he was doing something he really wanted to do. It seems quite odd to not be mad at your child when they just blew up your fence, but all Elsie wanted was for Sonny to prove his dad wrong. Sonny’s dad believed that he wasn’t going to be something big like his brother is in football, and that he’s going to be like all the other guys in Coalwood: working at the mine for a living.

Quotation: "'He's just like Homer,' I remember toothless Poppy lisping to Mom while I squirmed... 'No, you're not,' she crooned just loud enough so only she and I could hear. 'No, you're not'" (Hickam 15-16).

Reaction: The quote shows how Elsie disagreed with Sonny’s grandfather. She believes that Sonny could be much more than his father, and that he can get out of Coalwood. Sonny is the protagonist of the novel, and his father, Homer, is the antagonist. Now, to be a character one must have a desire, and Sonny’s desire is to built a rocket. His father as the antagonist is the person who interferes with Sonny’s desire. As for the plot, the story takes place in Coalwood, West Virginia, in the 1950s.