Look to the Sky by Vivien Dean

I live in a household that is obsessed with the stars. My husband and I both grew up in love with the ideals of Star Trek, devoured science fiction, and spent long hours staring upward. My daughter decided by the age of nine she wanted to go into astrophysics, and while that's changed slightly over the years, she still worships Neil DeGrasse Tyson as much as the rest of us do. 

We live in a world where the possibility of going into a space is a reality, not a dream.

But what if we didn't?

Man took his first steps on the moon on July 21, 1969, the culmination of the decade long Apollo Program. Can you imagine what it must've been like in those years leading up to it? Seeing the stars up close and personal didn't necessarily have to be a pipe dream. All of a sudden, there was hope. With so many men going off to Vietnam, and times changing so swiftly, hope became a very valuable commodity.

That's where my thoughts started when I began contemplating a story for the 60s pax. I wanted to meet the young man who'd had those hopes and find out what happened to him if they got taken away. Because let's face it. Working for NASA is serious business. They prided themselves on taking only the best of the best, so not everybody who wanted to found their way there.

Jim McCutcheon was born. The golden boy with huge dreams, suddenly dragged back to earth by the reality of the world in which he lived.

But who did he love? What kind of boy would steal Jim's heart? And what kind of boy would it take to heal his hurt?

Someone strong. Someone who understood what it meant to lose hope. 

Enter Ronnie. A Vietnam vet who's home again after getting hurt. He had his own baggage to bring into this relationship, but I loved him for his dogged determination and resilience.

So did Jim. And the story of these two young men reconnecting after losing so much turned out to be Silences of Fallen Stars.

When they graduated from high school in 1962, best friends and secret lovers Jim McCutcheon and Ronnie Mayer had high expectations for the rest of their lives. Six years later, both are back in the small Nebraska town they called home, and worse, no longer together.

Once the golden boy, Jim now works on his grandfather’s farm, ignoring the disappointed looks he gets from everyone who expected him to end up at NASA. Ronnie lives in his parents’ basement, recovering from the blast that sent him home from Vietnam. Neither one is where they want to be, but it takes a special request from Ronnie’s mom for Jim to swallow his pride and visit.

Though the trip doesn’t go well, it opens the door for the two young men to start communicating again. One question haunts them, though. Have they changed too much to find their way back to each other?

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Silences of Fallen Stars by Vivien Dean is now available at Amber Allure.

If you'd like the chance to win the entire pax collection, just leave a comment on today's post. On Saturday, a winner will be picked at random from all the comments made this week on the blog. Comment on all, and that's multiple chances to win!