Lightning Bugs and Aliens is a coming-of-age story, which means it’s a story about five kids who think they’re hunting aliens but are really discovering who they are. Babka sets this in summer 1960 — pre-internet, pre-cell phones, pre-social media — which gives the boys the freedom that American childhood had in that era and has largely lost since.
The Cold War paranoia angle is well-handled. The science fiction movie craze and Soviet missile anxiety weren’t abstract to those kids; they were the texture of the imaginative world available to them. When an explosion triggers an alien investigation, it feels earned rather than contrived.
What gives the book its weight is the race and trauma underneath the adventure. Babka isn’t writing nostalgia. He’s writing truth.
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