If you think of Ray Bradbury as a writer of dystopian
science fiction tales, you may pass up reading Dandelion Wine. And that would be a
pity. Dandelion Wine is a
marvelous, heartwarming, nostalgic book about Green Town (aka Waukegan,
Illinois) in the summer of 1928. The chief character is 12-year-old
Douglas Spaulding (presumably Bradbury himself), and the perspective is
that of his older self reflecting on the lessons from that eventful
summer.
Those three months bring a lot of changes for Doug, his younger brother
Tom, and their relatives and friends. Three beloved elderly people die.
A mass murderer terrifies young women. Doug’s close friend moves away.
The trolley is replaced by the streetcar. The mechanical witch in an
arcade is breaking down. Then there is Doug’s interior awakening — the
heady realization that he is alive, the sobering realization that
everything alive eventually dies. The vignettes in Dandelion Wine capture small-town
America in the 1920s: the soda fountains, junk peddlers, porch sitting
on lazy summer evenings, childhood games, Grandpa’s dandelion wine
making. Awakenings come to young and old and in between. Boys discover
that an old Civil War soldier is a human time machine; a newspaper
reporter discovers a soulmate in a 95-year-old woman; an older woman’s
interaction with children leads her to let go of the past.
Dandelion Wine is a time
capsule of an era as well as a purveyor of universal truths, saved from
sentimentality by the looming presence of mortality.
Home
My
reviews
My
friends' reviews