Lightning Bugs and Aliens absolutely absorbed me. I went in for the premise — five kids in 1960 small-town Ohio convinced they need to find aliens — and stayed for the gorgeous, specific, emotionally layered story underneath it.
Babka captures the texture of that summer so vividly: the Cold War paranoia, the science fiction movie craze, the particular freedom of kids who didn’t have devices to retreat into. And then he layers in the harder stuff — race, trauma, friendship across social divides — without ever making it feel like homework.
An Amazon reviewer said they felt “transported back into time and back with my own childhood friends.” Completely agree. This one hit me harder than expected.
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