Helpful Score: 3
This book is not what you expect if you read Bradbury for his sci-fi or horror. It has a sinister side, but mostly it tells the story of the summer of magic that young boys have in their hometown. This is essential Bradbury- his voice, his love, his art. And I'm taking a risk when I say it would make great school reading- but it breaks out of the mold of high school reading that depresses young and inquisitive minds. This book is a beautiful description of an era not so different from the one I grew up in a little later- the kids walked where they wanted, by themselves, they ran it when the spirit hit them, and they did not get drawn into virtual worlds unless it was a book or movie theater. Ah, now, I'm starting to sound like a fogey. Let the book speak to you, its words and music and magic are timeless.
Helpful Score: 2
Not your typical Bradbury. A master of words. I am eternally imprinted with his similies and metaphors.
Helpful Score: 2
I love this book! I actually have several copies on hand to loan to friends. The prose is fresh and Bradbury-esque, and reading it makes me feel like I'm ten years old again at the start of my summer vacation.
Helpful Score: 1
I finally got around to reading this one after being on my shelf for a couple of years and I have to say that it was really enjoyable. This is a Bradbury novel that tells the story of a magical summer in 1928 from the perspective of Douglas, a 12-year old boy. Actually, the book is a collection of stories told about various characters in a small town in Illinois. The characters and events in this novel are very memorable and include stories of the old and how death affects everyone in the town. Bradbury has a knack for making common day events mystical and enchanting. I would highly recommend this one!
Helpful Score: 1
Awestruck! That's how I feel. This is is probably my best read of the year. While I had read much written by Bradbury I had never before read Dandelion Wine. It's enchanting! I felt as if I were living in Green Town in 1928. Bradbury has that much power.
Drawing from memory and using his phenomenal imagination and flair for writing, he writes about two brothers and the summer of 1928. They keep a journal of the summer, capturing events as they experience them. Each chapter is a snapshot of the summer. I cried when Douglas was sick, cheered when the old man the boys called the time machine chose his own way to die, and smiled when an old woman chose never to be young.
It's hard to vocalize all the ways this book affects the reader. If you keep any books in this day of electronic reading this is one that you should put on your shelf to read again and again and again. Yup, this is from one who does not usually reread books.
Drawing from memory and using his phenomenal imagination and flair for writing, he writes about two brothers and the summer of 1928. They keep a journal of the summer, capturing events as they experience them. Each chapter is a snapshot of the summer. I cried when Douglas was sick, cheered when the old man the boys called the time machine chose his own way to die, and smiled when an old woman chose never to be young.
It's hard to vocalize all the ways this book affects the reader. If you keep any books in this day of electronic reading this is one that you should put on your shelf to read again and again and again. Yup, this is from one who does not usually reread books.
Good classic, have sons the same age so it was kind of a good read to read a book from a child's perspective on summer!
ALL Ray Bradbury books are terrific reads. He is truly a master story teller.
This is my all-time favorite book. I've read it many, many times. A wonderful story of growing up in a small town. If only we could all have a childhood like this.
Dandelion Wine was first published in 1957 and is a fix-up novella of other loosely connected short stories, many of which had been previously published. However, upon listening to it, I could not tell that it was written in such a way, which shows Ray Bradburys craftsmanship in sticking them all together into a single fluid story. This tale is 90% mainstream fiction, with a slight, nebulous time travel element; hence, it is classified as science fiction. I had not heard the details of this tale before and I was expecting much more science fiction, or at least Outer Limits type plot. Alas, no. The story was well written for its brevity and I enjoyed certain elements of it, such as Dougs shy interactions with the librarian and his fascination with a new pair of sneakers. However, this work just didnt do anything special for me. I found myself waiting for something to happen in the story, and when it finally did, the events were not resolved, but rather the story turned into a Lesson, a lesson about growing up, letting go, and moving on. I know Ray Bradbury, and probably this work in particular, holds a lot of magic for many folks. I just am not one of those folks.
I absolutely love this book. I don't know why it only has three stars on here. I've loved this book since the first time I read it 20 YEARS AGO! This book inspired me like nothing else I've ever read. ( I still have the original copy with a dandelion pressed inside )It touched my heart. But then Ray Bradbury will always have a place in my heart. At a terrible time in my life I picked up this book and it saved me. I hope it does the same for someone else. It's science fiction, poetry and a story about small town life all wrapped in one. It's beautiful, moving and even scary in parts. I would recommend it to anyone.
This book has been sitting on my shelf for some time. I finally decided to read it through when I came across a short video of Ray Bradbury talking about it, in light of the 2006 sequel. In the interview, an 87-year-old Bradbury said: "people come to my stories knowing that I'm one of the world's greatest lovers... I love movies, the stage, libraries, and it shows in my work, so people come to me to learn how to love. That way, you influence people; they don't know that they're being influenced, but they are. They hold out their hands, and their souls are in the hands, waiting to be warmed.
"I've written many stories about older people. When I wrote Dandelion Wine years ago I wrote about older people and their relationships with younger people, and in recent years I wrote a sequel, a conversation between a thirteen-year-old, myself, and the 87-year-old man, myself now. The two Bradburys are in the book: the young one and the old one. The old person is there and the young person is there. Like Grant and Lee at Appomattox, they have to make peace with each other, and they have to have an exchange of ideas, so that the young boy accepts the old man, and the old man accepts the boy, so my latest novel is about myself at this age accepting myself when I was thirteen. It's a great thing!" (2011)
This 1957 gem of a novel is among Bradbury's very best, in an unexpected way. The poetic imagery be strong with this one! This gorgeous narrative is about two brothers' summer adventures in childhood, replete with experiences that occur around them in a town, constituting, in the words of one reviewer, a love letter to summer holidays. As with many of Bradbury's novels, this is bursting at the seams with quotables. It's set in the summer of 1928, in the fictional town of Green Town, IL, one loosely based on his own childhood hometown, Waukegan, IL. It began life as a short story of the same title, which featured in "Gourmet" magazine in June, 1953. The title refers to a compote beverage believed to be of Celtic origin, comprised of ingredients such as dandelion petals from the bright, yellow heads (but don't use the green base; it will make the concoction bitter!), citrus fruits, raisins and sugar, mirthful ingredients representing "all the joys of summer in a single bottle." Bradbury writes: "Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered."
Indeed, the novel itself reads like one of Bradbury's exquisite short story collections, appearing as a pearl-string of vignettes, focused on place memory and especially the relations between young and old, old and new. Here, in an unspoilt small town, in the wake of a great conflagration and an ensuing pandemic which has nonetheless resulted in a new era of interconnectedness, bringing novelty and rapid social change, elders wish to make a connection with the young and the next generation, to preserve their own youth, to bind together past, present and future, to leave something of themselves behind when they're gone.
The novel thus also highlights an ensuing resistance to change, and the acknowledgement that not everything new is better. My favorite chapter was 39, "The Magic Kitchen," where the past and the present must negotiate for precious, contentious space. In the name of progress, novelty, Aunt Rose convinces Doug's grandmother that she should change her time-honored cooking methods, which involves rearranging her kitchen, wearing glasses and working from a cookbook rather than reliance on recipes committed to memory, which have been passed down through generations and over the course of a lifetime, embedded deeply enough to constitute animal instinct.
Aunt Rose initially persuades Grandma to abandon time-honored tradition and accumulated ancestral knowledge, but Doug intervenes: fearful of losing the magic of Grandma's kitchen and her collection of place-memory spells, he steals downstairs at night and restores the kitchen to its former glory, ridding the house of the glasses and the cookbook, so that Grandma can reconstitute her love of cooking. The result is that family tradition continues uninterrupted, un-defiled, pristine, with everyone sitting down to a veritable family feast. Perhaps one reason I liked this novel so much is that there is a definitive anti-techology/progress vibe to it. Tradition wins out over novelty and persists just a little longer in the safe harbor of a small Midwest town, although there is the ultimate acknowledgement that nothing stays the same forever. Still, the loss of childhood memory and innocence is something to lament, not celebrate.
The last chapter of the book brings an end to the glorious summer of 1928, with Douglas and his brother Tom perusing the shop window for school supplies, as the family makes preparations for the autumn to shortly to come. Douglas finally acknowledges, on the cusp of self-awareness and hence adulthood (and by extension, a loss of innocence), "if trolleys and runabouts and friends and near friends can go away for a while or go away forever, or rust, or fall apart or die, and if people can be murdered, and if someone like great-grandma, who was going to live forever can die... if all this is true... Douglas Spaulding, some day, must."
This delightful, introspective, semi-autobiographical novel about a boy's recollection of a summer in his childhood in rural Illinois is definitely is in keeping with Bradbury's statements above. Its most profound passages stay with you for the rest of your life, and speak to someone's life experiences in a way in which only Bradbury can. The beautiful, prolific visual details are among Bradbury's best and most poignant. The protagonist is at an age at which people are beginning to grasp the gravity and enormity of life, including its impermanence, which comes the realization that things won't always be the way they are, hence the recurrent theme of youth and old age: it's the age when one can comprehend death, and that the people who are with us now won't always be. Every moment with them is precious, like the poignant, profound and inestimably insightful passages of one of Bradbury's most underrated but most stellar masterpieces.
"I've written many stories about older people. When I wrote Dandelion Wine years ago I wrote about older people and their relationships with younger people, and in recent years I wrote a sequel, a conversation between a thirteen-year-old, myself, and the 87-year-old man, myself now. The two Bradburys are in the book: the young one and the old one. The old person is there and the young person is there. Like Grant and Lee at Appomattox, they have to make peace with each other, and they have to have an exchange of ideas, so that the young boy accepts the old man, and the old man accepts the boy, so my latest novel is about myself at this age accepting myself when I was thirteen. It's a great thing!" (2011)
This 1957 gem of a novel is among Bradbury's very best, in an unexpected way. The poetic imagery be strong with this one! This gorgeous narrative is about two brothers' summer adventures in childhood, replete with experiences that occur around them in a town, constituting, in the words of one reviewer, a love letter to summer holidays. As with many of Bradbury's novels, this is bursting at the seams with quotables. It's set in the summer of 1928, in the fictional town of Green Town, IL, one loosely based on his own childhood hometown, Waukegan, IL. It began life as a short story of the same title, which featured in "Gourmet" magazine in June, 1953. The title refers to a compote beverage believed to be of Celtic origin, comprised of ingredients such as dandelion petals from the bright, yellow heads (but don't use the green base; it will make the concoction bitter!), citrus fruits, raisins and sugar, mirthful ingredients representing "all the joys of summer in a single bottle." Bradbury writes: "Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered."
Indeed, the novel itself reads like one of Bradbury's exquisite short story collections, appearing as a pearl-string of vignettes, focused on place memory and especially the relations between young and old, old and new. Here, in an unspoilt small town, in the wake of a great conflagration and an ensuing pandemic which has nonetheless resulted in a new era of interconnectedness, bringing novelty and rapid social change, elders wish to make a connection with the young and the next generation, to preserve their own youth, to bind together past, present and future, to leave something of themselves behind when they're gone.
The novel thus also highlights an ensuing resistance to change, and the acknowledgement that not everything new is better. My favorite chapter was 39, "The Magic Kitchen," where the past and the present must negotiate for precious, contentious space. In the name of progress, novelty, Aunt Rose convinces Doug's grandmother that she should change her time-honored cooking methods, which involves rearranging her kitchen, wearing glasses and working from a cookbook rather than reliance on recipes committed to memory, which have been passed down through generations and over the course of a lifetime, embedded deeply enough to constitute animal instinct.
Aunt Rose initially persuades Grandma to abandon time-honored tradition and accumulated ancestral knowledge, but Doug intervenes: fearful of losing the magic of Grandma's kitchen and her collection of place-memory spells, he steals downstairs at night and restores the kitchen to its former glory, ridding the house of the glasses and the cookbook, so that Grandma can reconstitute her love of cooking. The result is that family tradition continues uninterrupted, un-defiled, pristine, with everyone sitting down to a veritable family feast. Perhaps one reason I liked this novel so much is that there is a definitive anti-techology/progress vibe to it. Tradition wins out over novelty and persists just a little longer in the safe harbor of a small Midwest town, although there is the ultimate acknowledgement that nothing stays the same forever. Still, the loss of childhood memory and innocence is something to lament, not celebrate.
The last chapter of the book brings an end to the glorious summer of 1928, with Douglas and his brother Tom perusing the shop window for school supplies, as the family makes preparations for the autumn to shortly to come. Douglas finally acknowledges, on the cusp of self-awareness and hence adulthood (and by extension, a loss of innocence), "if trolleys and runabouts and friends and near friends can go away for a while or go away forever, or rust, or fall apart or die, and if people can be murdered, and if someone like great-grandma, who was going to live forever can die... if all this is true... Douglas Spaulding, some day, must."
This delightful, introspective, semi-autobiographical novel about a boy's recollection of a summer in his childhood in rural Illinois is definitely is in keeping with Bradbury's statements above. Its most profound passages stay with you for the rest of your life, and speak to someone's life experiences in a way in which only Bradbury can. The beautiful, prolific visual details are among Bradbury's best and most poignant. The protagonist is at an age at which people are beginning to grasp the gravity and enormity of life, including its impermanence, which comes the realization that things won't always be the way they are, hence the recurrent theme of youth and old age: it's the age when one can comprehend death, and that the people who are with us now won't always be. Every moment with them is precious, like the poignant, profound and inestimably insightful passages of one of Bradbury's most underrated but most stellar masterpieces.
I didn't appreciate beautiful prose like this when I first read it in high school or college. This time around I fell in love with it. I don't plan to re-post this book because I want to share it with others and re-read it myself!
From one of America's greats in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. An interest catching, heart engaging, well crafted book that's just that little bit unusual which makes a great classic.
One of my very favorite books; my book group just read it. Sweet, human, by turns terrifying and uplifting.
I had to read this for school, and I was surprised by how much I liked it.
My favorite Ray Bradbury story I've read so far. The stories within the book will stay with you for a very long time. This is a great read when you're really yearning for summertime.
Read the first several chapters and then skimmed the remainder. Guess I'm the wrong gender and age to find this book interesting.
Just must not be my kind of book.
Good condition. Grandmaster edition.
