I confess that I have never tasted dandelion wine. In fact, I have never seen any golden bottles of this summer magic arranged on a cellar shelf awaiting the right time for sampling. I wasn’t around in 1928, but I am lucky enough have experienced the magic of a childhood summer in a world where helping Grandpa bottle wine would easily have been someone’s ritual.

At the beginning, this seemed as if it might be just a collection of vignettes that might not tie together well enough to classify as a novel, but by the end, I had decided it was much more cohesive than I had anticipated. I loved the way the stories almost mirrored the mind of the twelve year old, Douglas Spaulding, whose summer we are invited to share. Every day is a new adventure when you are twelve and have a true degree of freedom, so every chapter represents another piece of an adventure puzzle for me.

Sitting on the summer-night porch was so good, so easy and so reassuring that it could never be done away with. These were rituals that were right and lasting; the lighting of pipes, the pale hands that moed knitting needles in the dimness, the eating of foil-wrapped, chilled Eskimo Pies, the coming and going of all the people.

I was there immediately. I knew times when summer's arrival was marked by iced tea replacing coffee. Once every summer, when I was a child, my mother would make homemade ice cream. We would take turns turning the handle and wait for what seemed forever for it to set enough to be spooned out into bowls and devoured. Nothing you buy in a store even comes close.

Ray Bradbury whisked me back to that world that I had left behind me for so long.

There was a smell of rain. Mother was ironing and sprinkling water from a corked ketchup bottle over the crackling dry clothes behind Tom.

I smiled at this reference to sprinkler bottles...everyone I knew owned one; no one ironed without one.

The smells and wonder of Doug's Grandma's kitchen made me think of my own grandmother, who always had something delectable sitting on the table and whose cornbread was as delicious as any cake you will ever eat.

Along with all these precious memories, there are words of wisdom, like these:

When you’re seventeen you know everything. When you’re twenty-seven if you still know everything you’re still seventeen.

I’d hate to admit how many people I know who are perpetually seventeen.

Also, Bradbury gives us glimpses into the varieties of people who make up our world--not just the children, but also the very old, who are just as genuinely painted as their younger counterparts.

”Some people turn sad awfully young,” he said. “No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world.

Bradbury’s prose is lyrical, his descriptions are transporting, he captures the magic of adolescence and makes us wonder if we have, in fact, been treated to some magic of a more concrete kind or just the magic that exists in the mind of the young and uncorrupted.

A lot happens during this fictional summer, and as Doug and his younger brother Tom lament its loss and project to the next summer, which seems so far away, I could not help thinking how quickly these boys will lose their innocence, their freedom, their world, and be left with only the memories of summers like this one, time with Grandpa, and the bottling of dandelion wine.

Douglas, conducting an orchestra, pointed to the eastern sky.
The sun began to rise.
He folded his arms and smiled a magician's smile. Yes, sir, he thought, everyone jumps, everyone runs when I yell. It'll be a fine season.
He gave the town a last snap of his fingers.
Doors slammed open; people stepped out.
Summer 1928 began.

Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine is a masterpiece, and one of the most emotionally evocative books I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Told through a series of vignettes, the summer of 1928 is magically unfurled for the reader by this truly inimitable author. Bradbury is an absolute nostalgia machine: for summers gone by, for the enchantment, innocence, and boundless adventure of childhood, for experiences we've all had at one time or another...things we've smelled, like fresh-cut grass...things we've tasted, like chocolate ice cream on a hot summer day. Things we remember. About who we once were. About who we are.

The characters in this book are top-notch, and unforgettable. The young Douglas and Tom Spaulding (Douglas is the main protagonist in this book), rocketing from one crazy adventure to another. Colonel Freeleigh, the human time machine. Leo Auffmann, the town jeweler who strives to build a "Happiness Machine". Grandpa Spaulding and his lawn, which he likes just the way it is. Mr. Jonas, the junkman. Even The Lonely One, the mysterious serial killer who haunts the town, provoking religiously-locked house doors and early curfews for the town's children.

Dandelion Wine is a quintessential summer book, and in my opinion Bradbury's greatest achievement in this book is his powerful portrayal of the cyclic nature of summer, and, perhaps, of life itself? True, last summer is gone now. Forever. Its grasses have turned from vibrant green to dull brown. Its sounds have been silenced. Its activities halted...

But soon, when the snow melts and the ground thaws, another will emerge, and like every summer before it, to the inner child in all of us, it will be, eternally, cyclically, the greatest of them all. Therein lies the true magic of Ray Bradbury: he makes you nostalgic not just about your past, but about your future...

He shut his eyes.
June dawns, July noons, August evenings over, finished, done, and gone forever with only the sense of it all left here in his head. Now, a whole autumn, a white winter, a cool and greening spring to figure sums and totals of summer past. And if he should forget, the dandelion wine stood in the cellar, numbered huge for each and every day. He would go there often, stare straight into the sun until he could stare no more, then close his eyes and consider the burned spots, the fleeting scars left dancing on his warm eyelids; arranging, rearranging each fire and reflection until the pattern was clear....
So thinking, he slept.
And, sleeping, put an end to Summer, 1928.

like good poesy and full of magic..
Enorm in his description power, you can see, hear and even smell the summer!!
I must digest all this beauty and enchanted prose, folks..
Bradbury has blown me away with Dandelion wine!!
But I must continuing my readings, Ray Bradbury has me again on the hook, and he will not let me go until the last page is enjoyed!!

The Storys are superb..
I want much more by Bradbury and his Green Town series!!!

A wonderful and exciting experience!!!
"The Tarot Witch" and other Storys full of ambiente and saturated with colors, pictures and even smells, creating a world--vivid and sparkling--

Bradbury has keep me fascinated and has made me forget my reality and surroundings..
Great and powerful written!!!


Highly recommendable to all of you lovers of very good fiction!!!

Dean;)

"Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered."

“I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget, I'm alive, I know I'm alive, I mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.”

Doug (12) and Tom (10) Spaulding live in Green Town, Illinois. Bradbury published this book in 1957, though you can see why this became popular in the late sixties, celebrating summer and nature as it does. As Bradbury says in an introduction to a later edition, “Green Town. Waukegan. Byzantium.” For an Illinois reader as I am now, it feels very much like an Illinois book, situated as it is in a small town on Lake Michigan. As I began the book, a reread after decades of separation, it felt romanticized and sentimental, compared to my teenaged reading of it, which was just celebratory, as I seem to recall. It certainly is nostalgic, which as a much older man I appreciate more than I would have earlier in my life. Rereading the early chapters made me want to write my own book about, say, my own summer of 1965. I was annoyed at times by some of Bradbury’s romantic writing along the lines of “Somewhere, a bird whistled,” “Somewhere, a dog barked” and sort of stereotypical assumptions about how all American small towns are alike in their apparent homogeneity. But on the whole I liked these early chapters quite a bit.

“It was the face of spring, it was the face of summer, it was the warmness of clover breath. Pomegranate glowed in her lips, and the noon sky in her eyes. To touch her face was that always new experience of opening your window one December morning, early, and putting out your hand to the first white cool powdering of snow that had come, silently, with no announcement, in the night. And all of this, this breath-warmness and plum-tenderness was held forever in one miracle of photographic is chemistry which no clock winds could blow upon to change one hour or one second; this fine first cool white snow would never melt, but live a thousand summers.”

The book is episodic, a series of autobiographically fictional vignettes based on Bradbury’s Waukegan 1928 life, which is not to say it doesn’t develop and grow as a narrative of Doug’s coming of age summer. One incident I like has to do with the almost ecstatic memory of wearing new sneakers on a sunny day. They’re magic, as we see many things are in this summer. Which is to say that several things operate as what would now be called magic realism.

Early themes established include the importance of memory, of course; youth vs. adulthood/old age (some kids talk to an old woman, 95, who shows them pictures when she was a young girl; the young kids don’t believe she was ever young!); spirituality, imagination, and--a Bradbury staple--the importance of being human in the often dehumanizing world of technology.

I was completely seduced by the book just at the point the fantasy—the magical realism--turns dark, which is an important part of Doug’s coming of age, of course. The Ravine, Mr. Lonely (who kills young women), and the Tarot Witch from the Penny Arcade, all these loom ever larger as the summer proceeds. The specter of death is everywhere, as Grandmother dies, a young woman is killed, and as Doug himself gets very ill at one point.

Doug has a realization: "So if trolleys and runabouts and friends can go away for a while or go away forever, or rust, or fall part and die, and if people can be murdered, and if someone like great-grandma, who was going to live forever, can die. . . if all of this is true. . . Then I Douglas Spaulding must also . . ."

In the end, Doug still has fireflies and cicadas and starry nights and long conversations in the dark with family and friends. “Praying mantises, zeppelins, acrobats, sword swallowers!” But there is now the specter of death that is present in a way it had not been before. There remains over all a kind of sweet celebration of Doug’s twelfth summer, for any youthful summer, which I also had, which I hope you also had. It’s more special for me this year because I have kids that age (12, 11, 10) who had their own joyous (and thankfully not very dark) summer.

It kind of reminded me of the nostalgic horror fantasy of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I bet Gaiman owes something to Bradbury in this book, not the least a deep sense of the human and a meditation on the passage of time and memory, all within the context of fantasy/horror/magic.

The sequel, which I recently read, is Something Wicked This Ways Comes, which ups the darkness quotient. Goodreads friend Michael Jandrok says one should read Dandelion Wine, a meditation on summer, and summer's (childhood's) end, every September. Wicked is Bradbury's Halloween book, to be read maybe every October.

Dandelion Wine Recipe:

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/162202/d...

Dandelion wine stands for memory and in Dandelion Wine memory plays the leading role.

And there, row upon row, with the soft gleam of flowers opened at morning, with the light of this June sun glowing through a faint skin of dust, would stand the dandelion wine. Peer through it at the wintry day – the snow melted to grass, the trees were reinhabitated with bird, leaf, and blossoms like a continent of butterflies breathing on the wind. And peering through, color sky from iron to blue. Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.

Memory is a powerful time machine allowing us to travel through the past.

The reason why grownups and kids fight is because they belong to separate races. Look at them, different from us. Look at us, different from them. Separate races, and never the twain shall meet.

Childhood turns the world into the magic theatre and the old age takes the magic away…

War's never a winning thing. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms.

Dandelion Wine is a tale of growing up and acquiring wisdom bit by bit.

Trolleys, big as they are, always come to the end of the line…

And we are like those trolleys – we always come to the end of our line.

"Dandelion wine is nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood."

Bradbury, in the introduction, relates how this novel came to be. The yearly gathering of dandelions for wine making was like "gathering images of my life, storing them away." These memories of summer 1925 in Waukegan, Illinois (renamed Green Town in this novel) are recalled in this evocative book. From the feel of the summer heat, the pleasant creak of the front porch rockers, the smell of ozone from a welcomed shower, my own summertime memories were coming back to me, first slowly, one by one like a leaky faucet, increasing with rapidity, even finding their way into my dreams. Events deeply buried in my memory bank appeared with amazing clarity.

Through the voice of a twelve -year-old boy, Douglas Spaulding, Bradbury’s recollections of this special summer come alive. The thrill and anticipation of two months of freedom with its new adventures and new awakenings."Thinking about it, watching it, is new. You do things and don’t watch .Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing, and it’s the first time really." But the innocence of youth, this blissful childhood will not remain. Douglas learns those sneakers that seem to make you fly will wear out, friends move away, magic machines aren’t really magic, loved ones die, and you will also die. Summer may never have the same magic for Douglas, but the happy memories will be recalled throughout his life.

This is a story of a way of life that will never be again. It is an exuberance for the simple things in life and the inevitability and finality of death. Bradbury’s lyrical writing was unlike anything else I have read by him. It was a walk back in time for any adult, whether childhood was long ago or just ten years. It definitely should be read in summer, preferably while sitting on a porch in the heat of the day or on a balmy evening. A tall glass of ice tea or lemonade may help those memories pour back into your consciousness.

“This book… is a gathering of dandelions… I was gathering images all my life, storing them away, and forgetting them… I had to send myself back, with words as catalysts, to open the memories out.”

It is a loosely autobiographical collection of characters and anecdotes told by an omniscient narrator, focusing on two brothers, though there are episodes that don’t involve them: Douglas (12) is imaginative, impulsive, and dreamy, whereas Tom (10) is practical, sceptical, and analytical.

It is a delightful evocation of summer in a small town in northern Illinois: treasuring traditions, ambivalence about change, and all the fun, disappointments, and confusion of childhood: longing for new sneakers; fascination tinged with fear about the Ravine; friendships made and broken; solitary townsfolk who may be up to something; dread of “The Lonely One”; passion for trolleys (trams), trains, and machinery; the special relationship with grandparents; unusual combinations of ice-cream flavours; the love of stories, and learning to pay good deeds forward.

My only slight reservation is that sometimes the children felt too naïve for their age (girls of ten who couldn’t believe an old lady had ever been ten), and other times too wise (Doug and Tom are very philosophical and profound). I guess children were different in 1928.

There are many details I want to remember, especially the most beautiful sort of time machine, but to write them down might break the spell of something as delicate and ephemeral as a dandelion clock. I’ve compromised and hidden them in spoiler tags.


Image: A dandelion clock, with most of seeds gone, by Katarzyna Kawka (Source)

Fanciful machines


The Green Machine
It just seems to be a small electric vehicle, like a golf buggy. Ahead of its time, but lacking the alluring shine and smoke of trains and trolleys.

The Happiness Machine
An eight-foot tall orange box, filled with images to make you happy. But the joy of seeing lots of beautiful things you haven’t got or done, and never will, is overtaken by sadness, whereas a sunset’s beauty lies partly in its transience. Nevertheless, I use Instagram in a similar way: I follow only sources of beauty (art galleries, artists, museums, sculptors, antiquities, architecture, national parks, owls, puffins, and penguins).

The Time Machine
The most beautiful idea in the book, and so true. The boys are excited to learn that old Colonel Freeleigh has a time machine. It turns out he is the time machine: a fantastic raconteur who holds the boys spellbound.
His secret sadness is another form of time travel: he makes regular, expensive, long-distance phone calls to an acquaintance in Mexico City just to hear the sounds of the place again.



Time of change


“‘Every year the same things, same way, no change, no difference. That’s one half of summer, Tom.
‘What’s the other half?’
‘Things we do for the first time ever.’”

Most of the main characters are very old (deaths occur) or youngish, and time is a recurring theme - though the dandelions of the title are mentioned in the context of lawns and wine, but not clocks.

“If you ran, time ran… The only way to keep things slow was to watch a thing and do nothing.”

Doug, on the cusp of adolescence, is suddenly struck by the profound truth of the fact he’s alive. And thus, inevitably, of the weight of mortality.



Evil lurking?


The overall mood is carefree, but there’s a woman who may be a witch (there was one in my village too), a hit-and-run, the menacing atmosphere and sounds of the ravine, a well-meaning visitor who saps an old-woman’s confidence, a terrifying chase through the ravine at night, a strange scene involving a waxwork tarot-reader in a fairground, and a serial-killer.




Image: Waukegan (aka Green Town), Illinois, with trolley bus, in the 1920s or 1930s. Postcard by Lantern Press (Source)

See also

This book seems very different from his sci-fi, but awe at science and invention (there’s a time machine), along with poetic descriptions of nature, are typical Bradbury.

•tThe short story, The Playground, is set in the same fictionalised Green Town, which surprised me, as that’s much darker, and with a distinct supernatural element. See my review HERE.

•tThe Martian Chronicles is also a collection of (almost) separate incidents, and like Dandelion Wine, features fire balloons. See my review HERE.

Quotes

•t“The wine was summer caught and stoppered.”

•t“Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow.”

•t“Other boys rushed by like a swarm of meteors, their gravity so huge they pulled Douglas away from Grandfather and Tom.”

•t“I didn’t know old ladies had first names.” And they don’t believe she was ever ten years old.
•t“I don’t mind being old, not really, but I do resent having my childhood taken away from me.”

•t“She could see the children racing off… with her youth in their frosty fingers, invisible as air.”

•t“The trolley… swooped downhill through intervals of odorous sunlight and vast acreages of shadow that smelled of toadstools… They slid whispering on meadows washed with wild sunflowers.”

•t“A darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching designs both golden and invisible.”

•t“And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one, from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you are the last apple on the tree.”

•t“The warm breath of summer night shimmering off the sun-baked sidewalk.”

•t“She laid herself out like a fossil imprint under the snowing cool sheets of her bed and began to die.”

•t“The sun did not rise, it overflowed.”

•t“Some people turn sad awfully young.”

•t“The first cool touch of autumn moved slowly through the town and there was a softening and the first gradual burning fever in every tree, a faint flush and coloring in the hills, and the color of lions in the wheat fields.”

You want to see the real Happiness Machine? The one they patented a couple thousand years ago, it still runs, not good, all the time, no! but it runs. It's been here all along.
Dandelion Wine ~~ Ray Bradbury



Uncork and inhale slowly ...

“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.”

I re-read this after a couple of decades and like most works, I appreciate it better now than then.

“A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.”

It could be that the 40 plus year old is better suited to understand the perspective of the mature writer than the 16-year-old reader, or it could just be that this great work speaks on many different levels.

“The first thing you learn in life is you're a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you're the same fool.”

Fundamental Bradbury, this work explores many of the themes that are representative of his canon: coming of age, spirituality, imagination, and the importance of remaining human amidst an ever increasingly dehumanizing world of technology.

“Sandwich outdoors isn’t a sandwich anymore. Tastes different than indoors, notice? Got more spice. Tastes like mint and pinesap. Does wonders for the appetite.”

*** 2023 reread -

We should have an emergency box in our homes, if life is getting rough, we can break the glass and retrieve a Bradbury book to help us get through the day.

Bradbury makes me smile. His writing, here especially but in most of his canon, goes beyond poetry or prose and is instead an incantation. Ray was a mischievous sorcerer and cast for us spells to evoke a quieter time; a mystical, fantastic landscape where generational families exist and flourish and where adventures can still be had.

Modern critics could decry the antiquated sentimentality of his writing but I would submit instead that his work is timeless and is evocative of a universal human nature: we want to belong and we also want to love and laugh and have fun and the summer of 1928 he describes is still alive in the hearts and souls of children who don’t even know Bradbury and on the painted cave walls of our collective psyche.

This time I paid more attention to the subtle notes of horror dripping disquietude into his otherwise charming idyll. I wonder if David Lynch was inspired by this book when he produced and directed Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet. All three works describe a sunny setting with plenty of shadows creeping around the edges.

Bottles of home made dandelion wine line the basement shelves to recall for us each day of summer past so that we can relive the warmth of July on even the coldest day of December.

If you are looking for science fiction because it's Ray Bradbury, or a logical straightforward plot, or a book like all the others that you usually read, leave this one alone.

If you want magic between the covers once you start turning pages, then by all means open these doors. If you want beautiful prose (" the bee-fried air", bee-fried air, for Pete's sake!)
that captures a summer in 1928, that takes you inside the mind and imagination of Douglas and Tom Spaulding, 12 and 10 years old, here you go. If you need some lovely practicality, there's plenty from Grandma and Grandpa and Great Grandma too. Philosophy, time travel just from listening to elderly people, magic spells and potions that may or may not work, but who cares, it's all included in these pages.

This book made me happy. What more can you ask?

SO much better than Fahrenheit Thingy-Bobby.

it was the summer of 1928, way before Radio or TV were part of our life. 12 year old Douglas spent that summer exploring his small town and its people. He started jotting down his "discoveries and revelations" in a notepad so that he won't forget about them. We through him met extraordinary people of this small town. A man adamant on making a Happiness Machine, an old woman who thought that she had met her lover from her past life, going away of a dear friend, last ride on the trolley, and magical kitchen and many more stories. Each story was unique in its own way and was connected to other stories.

this was my first Bradbury and it won't be my last. I fell in love with how beautifully and smoothly he mixed these simple stories with magic. he made me feel like a child who was listening to these stories before sleeping at night and who in dream would revisit this magical world.

this story has all the right elements in the right proportion that made me squeal, jubilant, scared, mad, lonely, hungry, and love like a child.

highly recommended!