He?s a normal kid with normal kid desires and problems ? he?s concerned about his Boy Scout uniform and badges, he?s mourning the death of his mother and upset about his father?s new relationship, he doesn?t like girls, and he has to deal with bullies and a few stupid adults. Though Bill is having a life-changing experience, he?s still easy to relate to. In addition to homesteading skills, they?ll learn a bit of science, too. But I think the book is also appealing to kids who enjoy frontier stories such as Little House on the Prairie. You can?t get much more exciting than taking a spaceship to Ganymede to build a new colony, so youngsters looking for speculative adventure will surely enjoy Farmer in the Sky. The skills he learned in Boy Scouts prove to be helpful for this and other tasks he undertakes to help his new colony. Terraforming Jupiter?s moons is a difficult and dangerous enterprise, but Bill is determined to succeed by making his own farm productive. There?s a new colony on Ganymede and they?re struggling to survive as Earth, to ease its population tensions, keeps sending spaceship-loads of new settlers. In this story, Earth is overcrowded and food is rationed, so 16 year old Bill and his father George decide to emigrate to Ganymede, one of Jupiter?s moons. Farmer in the Sky took me back to my childhood ? when I loved to think about riding in spaceships while most girls were thinking about riding horses. I give Heinlein much of the credit for turning me into a speculative fiction lover at a young age.

Farmer in the sky heinlein