Five kids, summer 1960, small-town Ohio, convinced there are aliens because of a mysterious explosion and approximately too many science fiction movies. Lightning Bugs and Aliens is exactly the kind of summer adventure story that makes you remember being young and reckless and absolutely certain about things you had no business being certain about.
Babka gives these five characters genuine weight — their friendship, their different relationships to race and fear and family, their shared determination to find something extraordinary in an ordinary place. The Cold War anxiety running underneath the adventure adds a note that keeps it from being pure nostalgia.
Straight-forward storytelling, as advertised. Genuinely good.
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