Some books hold a specific temperature. Lightning Bugs and Aliens holds the temperature of summer 1960 in a small Ohio town — the particular warmth of that freedom, the particular anxiety of that Cold War paranoia, the particular light of lightning bugs against a night sky that felt full of possibility.
Babka has written about children who believe in something extraordinary — aliens, adventure, the world’s willingness to yield its secrets to the determined — and about the summer when that belief is tested by the complications of the real world. Race. Trauma. Friendship across lines that don’t bend easily.
The dedication is the key to the whole book: five hundred hours on the back steps of a family tavern with the son of Mississippi sharecroppers. That friendship produced this novel, which is itself an argument about what friendship can survive and what it makes possible.
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