Dandelion Wine by Ray BradburyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Bradbury doesn't quite offer a full fledged tale in "Dandelion Wine", but more of an episodic account of Summer, 1928 in the fictional town of Green Town, Illinois, and its' inhabitants as seen through the eyes of two young boys, Douglas and Tom. Seldom, outside of Douglas and Tom, who always seem to know where the action is happening in town, is the reader offered more than a 10pg. snippet per character. And that is not to put that decision in a negative light. Bradbury offers us just enough to know these people, to care about them, to care about who they love or hate. And he does it incredibly well. We turn the page wanting more, only to discover he's shifted gears and it's now several weeks in the future, and the children are observing someone else, but the same meticulous introspection persists and again we find ourselves caring, yearning. And we might hypothesize Bradbury consciously did this, fore if anything persists throughout this book, it is death, and its' embodiment: The Lonely One. For the boys to experience so much fatality at such a young age might trouble some out there, but where darkness resides, light is ever near. As Douglas ecstatically proclaims at the onset, "I'm really alive!" He certainly does not fail to find any shortage of that in the Summer of 1928.
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