In creative writing classes the instructor will often remind the novice that it is difficult to write about something that is close to an author. The subject becomes too personal, too emotional; the author cannot distance him/herself from the material enough to effectively depict the idea. So too does the reviewer of a book feel—when the book means a great deal to the person, it can be hard to feel that he or she is doing it justice rather than just throwing a list of positive-aspect adjectives together. I feel that my review of this book may face that challenge. With this in mind, let’s start with the easiest thing to say:TL;DR: I loved this book.Before I launch into specifics, let me give a bit of background. I have read several other Bradbury books at this point. In particular I very much enjoyed The Martian Chronicles because I thought that it represented a consistent, almost harsh (yet hopeful?) view of human nature. Likewise, I Sing the Body Electric is at times heart-warming, hilarious, haunting, sexy, and depressing; that is a wide range for one author, and it certainly speaks volumes about Bradbury’s talent that he could pull this off in one volume. Bradbury doesn’t seem to get all of the credit he deserves in literature, and I can only hope that time will be kinder to him than to relegate his reading (in the public’s mind) to Fahrenheit 451 assignments in high school. I hope too that English teachers discover these other wonderful novels.This applies most of all to Dandelion Wine. Above all of his novels that I have enjoyed to this point, DW is by far my favorite. I think there are two reasons for this.First, the novel represents an idyllic vision of the American past. In the place that Bradbury has created for us, the streets are safe to walk (generally speaking), people talk to one another on porches, there are dark places to face (though we can overcome these challenges), husbands and wives work out their differences, love is cyclical and eternal, and life as a rule is magical. In this America the conversations take place among adults who protect the reader, keeping the weight of the world firmly away from the recreated childhood that Bradbury depicts; the stories these adult conversations convey stretch across time, sometimes in impossible ways, sometimes just over a phone line. Here, the challenges of being alive are not insurmountable, nor is the specter of death truly frightening—it can be beaten by simply lying down and accepting it or by the clandestine activities of boys in an ancient arcade.The novel is aware of its Americana roots, and it plays to those tropes. Adventures wait around each corner, and there is a sense of the mythic, optimistic American past. Bradbury’s work is a love letter to American youth before the internet, before video games, before the cynical collapse of the world’s innocence in the atrocities of World War 2; his novel captures a time and place, setting down each archetype with care, with the heart-breaking honesty that is characteristic of all of his work. His characters are true to themselves and to their environment since they take part in their world, embracing it to find and fulfill their purpose. Here there are no problems that cannot be solved, for each person has a place and purpose.I am not so naïve to think that this time and place ever truly existed. But I am also not so cynical to think that art/literature cannot create it, at least in the minds of those who had some fragment of the experience captured in this work. This then is one of the reasons that I love this book; it is full of hope, of fierce wishing, and of the honeyed milk of a halcyon human past that never truly existed for any of us except in bits and pieces we disparately experienced. Though there is loss here, there is also the ability to cope with that loss. Each character is self-aware enough to overcome the tragedy inherent in his or her life.These are broad terms painted large, so let me find the rule in the specific for a moment. At the beginning of the book the main character goes on a trip with his father to pick strawberries. On this trip he has an experience that reminds him that his flesh and blood is real, that it is alive with the ache of life. His young mind explodes with the happiness of this moment, and he gently reminds his younger brother of this delicate privilege. This shows how self-aware the characters are; I don’t know many youths who discover their own mortality with such zest, nor do I know many authors who can so eloquently capture that time.This brings me to the second point: This book is beautifully written. Bradbury is a conscientious writer, one that finds the right combination of words to evoke the moment. Here each page wraps the setting, character, and plot together in a weave that makes the form fit the function. As a writer, I deeply appreciated this effort because it showed me possibilities that I had not found in other works. Though Joyce and Woolf (to take two outstanding authors) can teach you the novel of ideas and the play of language, Bradbury teaches you the heart and soul of it. Any creative writing class should start with a careful study of DW as a part of its curriculum. To give an example of this, let me step back for a moment. After making the aforementioned boy aware of his own life, Bradbury later creates the opposite point in the book. I won’t give details about this scene, but I will say that it creates one of many pieces of chiaroscuro that makes the novel stand out in paired contrasts that underline the central themes. Each idea has a counterpoint; each idea is not crudely painted, as it contains the seed of its own destruction, yet also the imprint of its own value. Life here has value because it is the struggle against death. Death here has value because it has come as the final punctuation to a life well-lived. It is beautifully conceived as a work of art. I won’t say much more on this point, as I think that the point is best made by simply encouraging you (if you are an aspiring author) to read this work.I want to finish with a final note: I have a vague memory of reading this work when I was younger. At that time I found the work dry and boring. The characters did not appeal to me, and the setting was dull. As an adult—as a father—I found the work held a power over me that I had not suspected was possible. The tragedies of life will educate us to subtly felt emotions that young minds cannot feel or even sense. I think that the wisdom of age makes possible drinking a novel like DW to the dregs; in some ways, I like to think that this is yet another reason that Bradbury has named the novel. But that is its own conversation, its own analysis. I hope that you will read this book and find your own.
Let’s get one thing clear Dandelion Wine is not science fiction, it is not exactly fantasy either, though there is some element of magic realism to it. So if you are a fan of Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi books like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, or his fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes, and you are looking for more in that fantastical vein, Dandelion Wine may disappoint you. The best mental preparation is to forget about genre and just let Bradbury tell his story in that uniquely beautiful way he does. “Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.”If one adjective can describe Dandelion Wine it would be “whimsical”. This book is not really about anything, but in some ways it is also about everything. On the surface it does not seem to be about anything because nothing particularly dramatic, strange or exciting happen in it. At the same time, looking at it another way, it seems to be about everything in so far as it covers a wide spectrum of the human experience; growing up, growing old, making friends, losing friends, acceptance of old age and of death etc. While Dandelion Wine is a novel, not an anthology, it is episodic in structure and reads a little like an interrelated collection of short stories. That said it seems more cohesive as a novel than The Martian Chronicles; perhaps because it features one central character, twelve year old Douglas Spaulding. Most of the novel is seen through his eyes though there are parts where other characters briefly take centre stage as protagonists. The story is set in Green Town, Illinois in the summer of 1928 where brand spanking new tennis shoes seem to have a life of their own when you put them on, where a man constructs a Happiness Machine that almost works, where a time machine sort of exists and many other magical things occur which are only magical if you look at them the right way.The most memorable chapter deals with a serial killer called The Lonely One and his creepy stalking of a girl who may be too brave for her own good. If this sounds like some James Patterson style nastiness it really is not, the brief episode is atmospheric and almost scary but done in the best possible taste. I also love the poignant story about a pair of “star-crossed lovers”, one born too early, the other too late; and the story of an old lady who learns to accept her age through some annoying meddling kids. The coming of age stories of Douglas Spaulding and his brother are charming but they did not really grab me as my childhood was nothing like theirs.As always Bradbury’s prose manages to be highly lyrical without any inclusion of highfalutin words that would have you reaching for the dictionary. This is the sort of book to curl up with and read at a leisurely pace. At less than 300 pages you could read it in a day or two but this is not a book to simply plow through. You would get more from it if you relax, soak in the atmosphere and the nostalgia, perhaps pausing now and then to reflect on episodes of your life that the book reminds you of. My only criticism of Dandelion Wine is that it may be too nice, sweet and gentle for my taste (serial killer notwithstanding).Dandelion Wine is said to be the first volume of Bradbury’s "Green Town” series, where Something Wicked This Way Comes is the second volume, followed by a couple more volumes which I have not read. Something Wicked This Way Comes is my favorite Bradbury book but it is an overtly fantasy book and does not seem to be connected to Dandelion Wine in any way except for the setting.In any case, although Dandelion Wine is not my favorite Bradbury it is a pleasant enough reading experience that puts me in a good mood. Definitely time well spent.
What do You think about Dandelion Wine (2000)?
If a day ever comes when the patisseries of the world draw back their prized pastries and sweets, and replace them with old and new copies of Dandelion Wine, I would be the first one, surely, to grab hold of the person next to me and aver in my most jubilant voice that Yes, I did see it coming. Nobody else but me in the whole wide world.Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding snaps his finger before a slowly waking Green Town, and thus begins the summer of 1928. A summer of surprises, of mysteries, of adventures, of love, and of death. A summer not to be forgotten, but to be relished. A summer to be bottled and put away, safe.Oft, reclining on the bed, after several bouts of breathing in the fragrance from the heart of the book and wool-gathering, I would pull out the bookmark and open the page on which I fell asleep the previous night, and I would wait. The voice inside me would then begin to read a word, and another, then another, popping the beautiful sentences one after the other into my mouth, sucking them like fruit drops*. And I, finding myself with a familiar feeling, would nestle against the fluffy and delicate new found presence under my head, a presence of something incorporeal, a presence summoned by the sheer exquisiteness of the prose, a presence that wraps itself around you, a presence that dabs your eyes with colours of different but vivid hues, so that the next time your eyes dart away from the page, you find the world a tad changed, it’s secrets more limpid and more familiar. With such prose, one needn't rest one’s head on pillows but the sentences, and then dream, and dream, and dream, with open eyes.Dandelion Wine is a celebration of life and death, old and young, dark and light, joy and terror… Bradbury’s love of life, of small joys, of the life of everyday, gambols about the pages and leaps out and grabs hold of you, never to let you go. If Zen in the Art of Writing was a kick in the pants for this reader and sent him rushing to the blank page, Dandelion Wine is a pertinent reminder to find one’s own magic, to salvage those contours and colours of this intractable thing called life, the contours and colours which the clock winds can whiffle down the rugged hills into darkness anytime. A reminder to bottle them, to put them away safely. And then one day, when you feel like it, you can climb down the stairs and walk into the dark cellar, and dip a finger into the bottle, and taste them once again.----A gentle turn of the last page, and then blankness, expected but still surprising, announcing the surcease, the cessation of the note, the echoes of its crescendo ricocheting the walls of the ears still, the blankness playing the final tune, a tune so faint you could mistake it for a whisper, a tune that tugs the heart as you close the page and say your silent goodbyes to the people of Green Town.But of course, all it would take is one more flourish and snap of the hands, and the summer of 1928 and Green Town would come alive once again, and with it you, Mr Bradbury, the boy who “finally fell out of trees when he was twelve and went and found a toy-dial typewriter and wrote his first ‘novel’”. Thank you for “falling out”; for emancipating a smile I was oblivious of but had inside me all along; for sprinkling my insides with scintillas of sweet and shimmering snow that tickled and awakened the magic I thought I had lost with words; for all the secrets I felt but cannot name…for all of that, and much more.----* Inspired by a quote from Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
—Ananthu
The only reason I gave this book five stars was because I couldn't give it five thousand.I can't express how beautiful this book is. I've never cried so hard (no, not even when Mrs. Johnson read us "Where the Red Fern Grows" in the third grade), nor have I felt so much love from a bunch of grouped together, sixty-year-old, courier-fonted words. I've never been more scared than I was by the possibility of the Lonely One being just around the corner, hiding in the shadows. I've never thought so much about my own mortality without running away from the subject in fear and forced-naivete. I've never felt more fulfilled by a reading experience on both an intellectual and spiritual level as I was with "Dandelion Wine."Read it. I beg of you. Your life will be better for it.
—Peter
Beautiful and poetic. Dandelion Wine takes place in a fictional Illinois town, modeled after Bradbury's own hometown, and features a 12 year old protagonist, Douglas, modeled after a childhood Bradbury. The book reads more like a series of short stories or vignettes, and includes a cast of town characters as memorable as a summer day from your own childhood. Moments of whimsy and imagination intermingle with heartbreak and sorrow as only a 12 year old boy can feel. Besides a somewhat fantastical "Happiness Machine" there really wasn't anything in Dandelion Wine to remind us that its author is most well known for his science fiction. Reading Dandelion Wine is like reading a summer long gone, if that makes any sense. Or, as Douglas so eloquently states, Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered.
—Brightness
