The summer of 1960 is a specific kind of frontier — no internet, no cell phones, just five thirteen-year-olds with a whole season ahead of them and an explosion to investigate. Lightning Bugs and Aliens understands that the best adventures are the ones where the boundaries of the known world feel genuinely close and genuinely crossable.
Babka’s Ohio is beautifully rendered as a place where the ordinary and the extraordinary press against each other. The Cold War paranoia about Russian missiles, the science fiction movies flooding small-town theaters — these are the cultural geography that shaped how these kids understood the strange.
The friendship at the center of the story, across the racial divides of 1960 America, is the real discovery. Babka knows what he’s doing.
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