With the startling emotional immediacy of a fractured family photo album, Jennifer Lauck's incandescent memoir is the story of an ordinary girl growing up at the turn of the 1970s and the truly extraordinary circumstances of a childhood lost.

Wrenching and unforgettable, Blackbird will carry your heart away.

To young Jenny, the house on Mary Street was home — the place where she was loved, a blue-sky world of Barbies, Bewitched, and the Beatles. Even her mother's pain from her mysterious illness could be patted away with powder and a kiss on the cheek.

But when everything that Jenny had come to rely on begins to crumble, an odyssey of loss, loneliness, and a child's will to survive takes flight...

Rocket Boys is an extraordinary memoir by Homer "Sonny" Hickam Jr., detailing his life in the hard-scrabble mining town of Coalwood, West Virginia. Until he began to build and launch rockets, he was unaware of the town's silent war against its own future and the unspoken conflict between his parents about his and his brother's lives.

In 1957, inspired by the sight of the Soviet satellite Sputnik crossing the Appalachian sky, Sonny and his friends, Roy Lee Cook, Sherman O'Dell, and Quentin Wilson, embarked on a journey to design and launch homemade rockets. Their journey was not just about rocket science; it was about daring to dream beyond the borders of their town.

With a cast of unforgettable characters, the boys learned to transform scrap into sophisticated rockets, sustaining their dreams in a town left behind by the postwar boom. Hickam's memoir is a powerful story of growing up, getting out, a mother's love, and a father's fears.

This uniquely endearing book captures universal themes of class, family, coming of age, and the thrill of discovery, all wrapped in vivid storytelling. Rocket Boys is evocative, magical, and a testament to the power of dreams.