Eyes on the Sky by J. Kasper Kramer is a delightful book with multiple layers. As the reader pulls these back, we learn a good deal about the desert and about Roswell, New Mexico, during 1945-1947 when the USA was conducting experiments. We also learn a great amount about twelve-year-old Dorothy Duncan and her brother Dwight.
A lover of science and comic books, Dorothy is a Junior Member of the American Rocket Society. She cares a great deal about jet propulsion systems and radio echoes from the moon, so she gets odd looks from others who invite her into conversation. As far as she is concerned, “textbooks were great for learning, but comic books could fire people’s neurons in totally different directions. The technological inventions of Jill Trent, Science Sleuth . . . had jump-started some of her favorite rocket designs” (26).
Furthermore, Dorothy is often in trouble for things like “bringing volatile chemicals to show and tell” (32) or for starting the family’s barn on fire. So, when an explosion lights up the sky and rocks nearby homes in Corona, she frets that it’s all her fault. After all, she had, against her brother’s explicit orders, launched a weather balloon that may have caused an aircraft to crash.
Now, she’s worried that her brother resents her and wants to send her away so that he can get on with his life. Two years ago, Dwight was called back home from the war when his parents died, leaving Dorothy orphaned. Now, he’s struggling to be a big brother, friends, and guardian to a girl who is convinced that Martians and flying saucers are visiting Earth.
“Maybe a scientific breakthrough at the nearby Roswell military base had gone horribly wrong or maybe a Nazi experiment had disrupted the space-time continuum” (17), but something is amiss, and Dorothy is convinced she needs to solve the mystery. She and a neighbor boy, Hugo Martinez sneak off to the crash site with a camera, hoping to capture evidence and to collect reward money. Their sleuthing sets the plot of Eyes on the Sky in motion.
Had something fantastic happened in the desert or is Dorothy guilty of causing trouble? Dorothy isn’t sure which story to trust since there are “too many ways information can get twisted and misunderstood, especially when people are excited or scared” (71). And fear can make people do and believe almost anything.
Kramer’s book also shares history, not only about the aftermath of the Great Depression but about the Trinity Project and the eventual dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- Donna