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\u003cp\u003e\u0026#8220;Baby Rocket\u0026#8221; is the name of a child who, in 1966, was abandoned by her suicidal mother and later found by a policeman in the seat of a children\u0026#8217;s rocket ride on Cape Canaveral. The novel is the story of this child\u0026#8217;s (Clementine Dance) adulthood discovery of an abandonment she does not remember, and how she comes to terms with it and her past.\u003c/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eUpon her father\u0026#8217;s sudden death in Santa Monica during the summer of 1998, Clementine \u0026#8220;Lem\u0026#8221; Dance finds a file about a \u0026#8220;Baby Rocket\u0026#8221; on his computer. The file suggests she is Baby Rocket but she's never heard the name; and her late father, a former NASA employee, James Walter Dance, Jr., had been prone to romantic white lies \u0026#8211; he claimed he once met Marilyn Monroe, for example. The file on \u0026#8220;Baby Rocket\u0026#8221; seems crazy and yet all too real: it contains Lem\u0026#8217;s birth certificate, a document which shows that her father was not her biological but rather her adoptive father and emails that show he\u0026#8217;d been in contact with her birth mother\u0026#8217;s surviving family \u0026#8211; as if he'd been on the verge of telling the truth.\u003c/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThese upheavals force Lem to retrace her parents\u0026#8217; lives and to re-examine her own; to get in touch with her mother\u0026#8217;s family; and, above all, to try to remember Baby Rocket. Before her discovery, she'd felt she knew herself. Afterwards, even her own \u0026#8220;jet-age\u0026#8221; nickname \u0026#8220;Lem\u0026#8221; \u0026#8211; or LEM, for the Lunar Excursion Module \u0026#8211; seems like a bad joke: once a symbol of hopeful futurity for her, given that she shares her name with an historical emblem of technological progress, the name only serves to remind her of a past she doesn't recognize. Such a journey takes her across the landscape of late 20th-century America, both geographically \u0026#8211; from California to Cape Canaveral \u0026#8211; and in time, in memory. As she pieces together the forgotten \u0026#8220;Baby Rocket,\u0026#8221; she re-inhabits the culture and dreams of the 1950s and 1960s, a time, a place and a vision that shaped her parents and herself.\u003c/p\u003e |
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