Babka is doing something structurally ambitious in Lightning Bugs and Aliens — weaving five distinct first-person coming-of-age perspectives through a single shared summer, each character carrying their own relationship to race, friendship, trauma, and the particular paranoia of 1960s Cold War America.

The choice to ground the supernatural premise — alien-hunting — in the specific cultural anxieties of 1960 is sharp. Science fiction movies and Soviet missile fears weren’t just backdrop; they shaped the imaginative vocabulary available to those kids. Babka knows this and uses it.

The dedication to the son of Mississippi sharecroppers Babka grew up alongside is worth noting. It signals that the friendship and race themes come from real experience rather than contemporary virtue. That authenticity shows.

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