A Boy's Guide to Outer Space

November 11, 2024
Selgin (Drowning Lessons) channels the boomer nostalgia of The Wonder Years in this affecting story of a Florida retiree’s 1960s adolescence. As a boy, Leo “Half” Napoli avidly followed the space race and dreamt of becoming an astronaut. Reflecting on that time while living on Florida’s Space Coast, he remembers his friends Wade “Skunky” Bledsoe, Victor Szentgyorgi, and Larry “Zag” Lengyl, who comprised the Back Shop Boys, so named because they each worked at the back of one of their Connecticut town’s hat factories. Half is 13 when his father dies. After his mother marries a hat salesman, Half takes his intellectually disabled new stepbrother under his wing. The narrative is largely episodic, chronicling Half’s ups and downs along with the fortunes of his friends, who band together to help Zag escape from juvenile detention after he’s sentenced for attacking his physically abusive father. The crew also grows obsessed with an enigmatic unhoused person known as the Man in Blue, with whom Half develops a deep friendship, and who turns out to be a WWII veteran. The narrative often loses steam, but the characters’ bonds feel lifelike, and readers will get a kick out of the period-specific pop culture references. This is worth a look.