Eyes on the Sky

by J. Kasper Kramer Narrated by Lillie Ricciardi

Overview

From acclaimed author J. Kasper Kramer comes a middle grade novel that's “part gritty historical fiction, part The War of the Worlds” (Kirkus Reviews) about a budding young scientist in 1947 Roswell, New Mexico, who fears her weather balloon experiment has been mistaken for a flying saucer!

Nothing ever happens in Roswell, New Mexico. Dorothy should know. She's lived her whole life on a rural ranch nearby, surrounded by the difficult memories from her family's struggles to make ends meet during the Great Depression years ago. At least her older brother Dwight is home safe from the war. Unfortunately, he's no better to talk to than her ancient pet sheep, Geraldine.

Thankfully Dorothy has her experiments, like launching rockets off the top of her windmill. But one stormy night, she sends a gigantic weather balloon into the stratosphere-and an incredible blast lights up the sky. Suddenly, all the newspapers feature a flying saucer crash in their headlines and the sleepy town of Roswell is alight with gossip and speculation. But what if the so-called extraterrestrial vessel is actually Dorothy's weather balloon?

When FBI agents start asking questions, she begins to suspect there's something out there, something dangerous. Either the government is after her for causing a national scandal...or aliens are real!

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

"Takes off with the incorporation of science fiction elements, and the meticulous, expertly rendered 1947 desert setting enhances its thrilling conclusion.

Kirkus Reviews

Part gritty historical fiction, part The War of the Worlds, the novel uses adventure and science fiction to make some pointed observations about the effects of war. . . . Dorothy, Hugo, and the place they call home are vividly rendered. . . . A courageous hero and some unexpected twists make for a compelling read.

Kirkus Reviews

2024-08-17
Unexplained flying objects cause chaos in post–World War II Roswell, New Mexico.

Twelve-year-old Dorothy Duncan is accustomed to finding solace in the sky. Several years ago, when Ma was sick, Pa was ineffectually pursuing get-rich plans, and older brother Dwight was a trainee pilot in the Army Air Forces, Dorothy took to climbing the dilapidated windmill on her family’s forlorn ranch and firing rockets into the air. Now, with her parents dead and her brother resentful about being forced to come home to care for her, she’s grown more reckless. She launches a weather balloon in a thunderstorm—and two subsequent explosions make her fear that she’s accidentally brought down a plane from the nearby Roswell military base. When Dorothy and her schoolmate Hugo Martinez search the desert for potentially identifiable wreckage, they find otherworldly debris—and curious Dorothy takes something that the strangers want back. Part gritty historical fiction, partThe War of the Worlds, the novel uses adventure and science fiction to make some pointed observations about the effects of war. Some characters feel less fully rounded and slightly more like plot devices, but Dorothy, Hugo, and the place they call home are vividly rendered. Most characters are cued white or Latine.

A courageous hero and some unexpected twists make for a compelling read. (author’s note)(Fiction. 8-12)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940191926308
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	10/08/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged
Age Range:	8 - 11 Years

Read an Excerpt

1. Fire in the Sky FIRE IN THE SKY
IT WAS A FANTASTIC IDEA. The best I’d had yet by miles. The only problem was that it might get me killed.

Lightning streaked across the black New Mexico sky, illuminating the desert grasslands below in an otherworldly, bright glow.

One Albuquerque. Two Albuquerque. Three Albuquerque. Four Albuquerque. Five Albuquerque.

Thunder grumbled in the distance.

“A mile,” I said under my breath.

The storm clouds were fierce and the wind smelled of coming rain. Violent gusts yanked at my hair, twisting curls in front of my eyes. I was thirty feet above the ground, precariously balanced on the wooden platform at the top of our old, rickety windmill. But I was too excited to be scared. Pulling my protective aviator goggles down over my face, I grinned.

Hammered halfway into a board at my feet were several long, bent, rusted nails. Tied to the nails were ropes. Tied to the ropes was a huge, gray rubber weather balloon, as big as I was. It had a shining metal tail composed of scrapyard junk—a design of my own making. Lightning flashed again and the balloon tugged against its restraints, wanting desperately to fly.

One Albuquerque. Two Albuquerque. Three Albuquerque. Four Albuquerque.

Thunder roared and rumbled across the flat, dry earth.

To be clear, I hadn’t planned on risking my life that evening. In fact, I rarely ever planned any of the dangerous things that I did. The experiment itself had been in the works for some time, of course. I’d begun gathering the necessary materials the same day I’d spotted the military-grade weather balloon floating lazily past our ranch. Getting ready to send the apparatus back up into the stratosphere had taken weeks of preparation.

But conducting the launch in the middle of the night during the worst storm of the summer? That hadn’t been on the agenda.

An image of my brother, his face red with anger, appeared in my head, but before I could dwell on it, lightning sparked through the sky. I forced myself to swallow my emotions.

One Albuquerque. Two Albuquerque. Three Albuquerque.

The wind howled. The tower swayed. I jumped when thunder growled. I wasn’t scared, but my nerves were as frayed as the cuffs of my trousers. When a terrible screeching noise began at my back, I instinctively ducked, looking over my shoulder.

The windmill’s great rusty sails, half-missing, had started to turn.

For the first time that night, I felt a moment of doubt.

If the tower’s ancient brake gave out, the spinning blades could come curving at me like a buzz saw. Perhaps even worse, they could collide with my balloon.

Weather balloons are meant to burst. That’s how they work. Scientists build them so that data collection machines can fly up and up and up—higher than any person’s ever been, high enough to see the whole world—and then pop! Down comes the research, falling all the way to the ground. It’s gathered and analyzed, and the process repeats.

I wasn’t collecting data myself. I hadn’t been lucky enough to find an intact meteograph. Mostly I just wanted to see how high I could get the balloon to fly and if I could find it again when it fell. But I still had several predictions. Hypotheses. That the balloon would eventually burst was a big one. However, I needed to make sure I was far away when it happened.

I took a deep breath, contemplating my choices. A proper researcher would have refilled the balloon using helium—a relatively safe, nonflammable gas. But even with the war over and done—and with helium, rubber, and latex no longer rationed—there wasn’t anyone around Corona selling balloon supplies. Lye and aluminum, though? Those I could just grab from the cupboard to make hydrogen.

First element on the periodic table. Extremely unstable. Flammable.

And explosive.

I never seemed to have second thoughts about these sorts of things until it was too late.

Lightning flashed so bright this time that I squinted behind my goggles.

One Albuquerque. Two Albuquer—

My heart skipped a beat at the clap of thunder. It was so loud that my ears rang. The screech of the spinning sails turned into a head-splitting shriek. In the background, beneath the chaos, I heard the first plinks of rain on the tin roof of our storage shed down below. I smelled the cracked earth and brittle plants as they grew wet.

It was nearly time.

I knelt, preparing to undo the knots in the ropes. My hands were shaking.

For now, the windmill’s brake was working. But getting struck by lightning was just as sure to get me killed as homemade hydrogen, a thirty-foot fall, or spinning blades. No doubt about it—the most dangerous choice I’d made that night was the timing. Launching a balloon during a storm was beyond reckless.

But I was too deep in the hole now to climb out. The only way forward was to keep digging down.

And really, this was all Dwight’s fault anyhow.

He’d come home late and in a bad mood. As always, we’d fought—about whose turn it was to cook supper and why there were hoofprints in the kitchen and the dirty dishes and the cluttered dining room table and my forgotten chores and his missing pliers and just nothing at all.

I’d retreated into my bedroom. Dwight had followed. We both had the tempers of diamondback rattlesnakes. And in his anger he’d grabbed one of the model planes from my bookshelf, gesturing dramatically, and the wings had snapped off in his hands.

The memory alone was enough to make me want to break something myself.

It made me want to watch something explode.

Above, the sky turned white with lightning, and for a moment it felt like I could see to the edge of the Great Plains. Desert grassland stretched on forever around me, our windmill and crumbling barn and little ranch home adrift in a pale, raging sea.

One—

Thunder came so fast on the heels of the strike that it was still bright as morning. My huge balloon strained against the wind, pulling taut on its ropes. I undid the first knot. Then the next. My hands were no longer trembling. Once the weather balloon was untethered, it caught a gust and darted upward. In a heart-stopping moment, I nearly went after it. The sheer weight of the thing yanked me to my feet, almost jerking me over the edge. For a terrifying breath, one of my legs dangled in the air—nothing but nothing between me and a deadly drop—and then I finally had the good sense to let go of the last rope. It slid through my hand, burning my palm raw.

But I barely felt any pain.

My gigantic balloon was free, soaring up, up, up, up.

I regained my balance and stared in awe. I could taste the chill air as the balloon broke through the first layer of clouds. I could feel the rush of speed as it inflated, zooming higher. I closed my eyes, rain wetting my forehead and cheeks, and imagined the spectacular view.

In the sky, anything was possible. Once you were high enough, you could land wherever you liked.

Or you could keep going.

Touch the stars.

When I came back to earth, my heart stuttered. I wiped the rain from my aviator goggles, trying to see through the wet blur, but it did no good. I’d lost track of my experiment. I took the goggles off. I scanned the horizon urgently, shielding my eyes from the downpour with a hand. A great zigzag of lightning slashed along the wild sky, too close for comfort—too close to feel safe at the top of a windmill. To the east came a bright reflection high above. It took a moment before I realized what I’d seen, but then I gasped in joy.

The balloon’s tail!

Though I’d built it with sunshine in mind, the scrap metal and tinfoil was reflecting the lightning like a beacon. It was only bound together with wire and decorative pastel Scotch tape, but if the tail held up a bit longer—and I could keep my eyes on its bright signal—I’d have a good guess about where the balloon might land. And since I’d scrawled my initials on with a marker, even if it got torn up, I could identify it.

Lightning struck nearby, and again I saw the reflection of the metal tail, brilliant as a beam from the sun. My balloon was so high now. It was so far away. And I was so mesmerized by the success of the launch that for a moment I forgot about my most important hypothesis. I forgot about the danger. I forgot about the fact that the giant rubber ball was filled with the same highly combustible gas as the Hindenburg.

About the fact that my metallic tail was not just reflective but conductive.

I was still searching the skies for another glimpse of my experiment, thinking only of maybes and might-bes—of the altitude, the temperature, the sparkling swirl of electric clouds—when an incredible blast lit up the desert, followed by an incredible sound.

It wasn’t lightning. And though we were only two days shy of the Fourth of July, I knew it wasn’t fireworks, either. Fireworks didn’t knock twelve-year-old girls—tall ones, at that—stumbling backward to land on their rear ends, mere inches from a certain and uncomfortable fall.

I crawled frantically back to the front edge of the platform, my heart racing, and searched the horizon desperately for a reflection.

Instead, I found fire.

A flaming object fell from the sky.

All I could think was, That’s not my balloon.

And then a second explosion, even bigger than the first, resounded through the night air.

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