By Ray Bradbury.
Begun 08 May 2006; finished 09 May.
I first read Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury some three years ago, but didn’t finish it. I’ve now read it a second time, and completed it too. What a delight it was!
Dandelion Wine describes, primarily through the eyes of 12 year-old Douglas, a summer vacation spent in a suburb of a place called Green Town, during the late 1920s. It is quintessential Bradbury: a series of vignettes and short glimpses (as opposed to actual stories) about people, a story not fantasy, but not quite reality either. What stands out in Dandelion Wine and his other short story collections is their everyday magic — and I don’t mean spells or anything out of the ordinary in our world, but how the most mundane and everyday of activities have their own special charm. Bradbury takes such ordinary events as going to the ice-cream parlour, cooking in the kitchen, speaking with an elderly soldier, buying new shoes, riding on a tram — and transforms them into extraordinary and profound encounters. Who would think that buying a new pair of shoes would be anything but ordinary? But Bradbury combines that event with the life of summer and a boy’s fantasy, and makes it a momentous occasion.