Essay On Rocket Boys

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Rocket Boys takes place in the late fifties, in a small town in West Virginia named Coalwood. This place isn’t like most - it’s a company town. Coalwood was built because there was coal discovered underneath the land. It’s a town that provided homes to miners and their families. Sonny has a relationship with Coalwood due to his father. He is the son of the Captain, who, although uneducated, is the mine superintendent. People don’t like the way Sonny’s father runs things, so unfortunately the children of the angry parents take it out on Sonny, because he is the Captain’s son. His rough relationship with Coalwood helps and hinders him strive for his dream of launching rockets because he longs to experience what life is like outside of this mining …show more content…

Sonny was different, though. His mom had opened his eyes in telling him that he should go to college and get out of Coalwood. All he had to do was prove to his father that he was smart, and could do it. “Show him you can do something! Build a rocket!” (Hickam 45). When Sonny begins experimenting with, building, and launching rockets, the town is definitely being stirred up and thrown off balance. People actually started called Sonny “Rocket Boy” (Hickam 51). The town itself affects Sonny because he doesn’t care about high school football, and it was never his dream to be a coal miner when he graduates. His dream was to create rockets. “Only coal mining was more important in Coalwood than high-school football. Sputnik, and anything else, was going to always come in a distant third” (Hickam 27). He wants to be someone. Someone who attends college and someone who can live a normal life without being trapped inside one small, dirty, coal mining town. "You can't count on the mine being here when you graduate. You need to do everything you can to get out of here, starting right now" (Hickam

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