October Sky Comparison

From the rather extensive list of summer reading books we were subjected to choose from, I, like everyone else read two books in order to complete my summer assignment. The first, surprisingly my favorite of the two, was October Sky, written by Homer Hickam, whom I discovered after a quick Google image search, is not the same persona as Homer Simpson, to my disappointment. It tells the narrative story of your average small town boy, the author himself, Homer ‘Sonny’ Hickam, the son of a coal miner foreman in the coal-industrialized town of Coalwood, West Virginia, living with his bickering parents and a pompous older brother in the 1950’s. His father is a bit absent in his life, seeing how his job at the local mine takes up most of his energy …show more content…
In an effort to both make his family proud and go after his dreams, Sonny gathers a ragtag group of school friends and forms the Rocket Boys, who go on a mission of teamwork, friendship, and heartbreak to create a working rocket that will pave their ticket to greatness. The second book I chose, which I liked less than the other one for several reasons, was Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden. This story follows the reflections of a geisha named Sayuri in early Japan, known as Chiyo in her youth, who is uprooted along with her sister from the poor fishing district she resides in of Yoroido, and sold to an okiya, or geisha house, to train underneath the women there in becoming a renowned geisha. There, Chiyo instantly gains the animosity of the best geisha there, a woman named Hatsumomo, who fears her position at the top is threatened by Chiyo’s beauty and does everything in her power to get rid of …show more content…
Throughout their lives, both main characters learned a great deal about the truths of reality and changes that come with life as it goes on and must adapt as best as possible to them. In the beginning of October Sky, Sonny repeatedly speaks about the intimidation he experiences whenever he’s around his detached father, never gaining the confidence nor voice to tell him his true feelings about taking over the family mining business and instead keeping mum whenever the topic arose. Even when Homer Sr. takes Sonny down into the mines one day and directly asks him what he feels about the business, a fearful Sonny simply tells his father he will think about it and evades answering. However, as Sonny grows and develops his love for engineering rocketry along with making new friends that convince him to let nothing can stand in the way of what he truly wants out of life, Sonny rearranges his thinking and in the end convinces his father as well that the mining business just isn’t for him. Sonny also grows socially as well. From the beginning of the story we are introduced to a crush of his named Dorothy, who is practically Aphrodite in his eyes from the way he speaks of her. This infatuation grows until gradually he begins to see that she is simply using him to feel better about herself, and his cutting off from her acts as symbolism for Sonny’s maturing character of not letting others use him as a