User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
The only reason I gave this book five stars was because I couldn't give it five thousand.
I can't express how beautiful this book is. I've never cried so hard (no, not even when Mrs. Johnson read us "Where the Red Fern Grows" in the third grade), nor have I felt so much love from a bunch of grouped together, sixty-year-old, courier-fonted words. I've never been more scared than I was by the possibility of the Lonely One being just around the corner, hiding in the shadows. I've never thought so much about my own mortality without running away from the subject in fear and forced-naivete. I've never felt more fulfilled by a reading experience on both an intellectual and spiritual level as I was with "Dandelion Wine."
Read it. I beg of you. Your life will be better for it.
Rating: really liked it
“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.”
Rating: really liked it
Magic Realism - according to Wikipedia
"
Magical realism, magic realism, or marvelous realism is a genre of narrative fiction and, more broadly, art (literature, painting, film, theatre, etc.) that, while encompassing a range of subtly different concepts, expresses a primarily realistic view of the real world while also adding or revealing magical elements. It is sometimes called
fabulism, in reference to the conventions of fables, myths, and allegory. "Magical realism", perhaps the most common term, often refers to fiction and literature in particular, with magic or the supernatural presented in an otherwise real-world or mundane setting."
This book is the essence of Magic Realism. If you are a fan of other Magic Realism books (i.e. McCammon's Boy's Life) you should definitely check this out. The setting is small town America, the main characters are your average young boys, but the things they encounter are far from normal (or are they?) - you will question what is real and what is imagination.
Nostalgia, young vs old, new ideas vs the status quo are all main themes. Learning from past mistakes, respecting the experience of your elders, and history repeating itself all make appearances. There is no life or death - just sunrises/sunsets, new beginnings, strong tradition, and acceptance of your place in all of it.
This book is deeply poetic and rightly so. A fantastically written story that should be read by anyone that appreciates great literature. I am looking forward to the sequel, Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Rating: really liked it
Beautiful Bradbury, Magical Ray
"a gathering of dandelions..."
In the wonderful introduction, Bradbury describes this book as a 'surprise' and
"a gathering of dandelions". The stories and memories from childhood and early life are the dandelions. The analogy of
'wine' seems to be very appropriate as this refers to the recollections and experiences that have been preserved (
"I was gathering images all of my life, storing them away, and forgetting them.")
[virginballoonflights.co.uk.]
"The wine still waits in the cellars below.
My beloved family still sits on the porch in the dark.
The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer.
Why and how?
Because I say it is so."
~ Ray Bradbury, Summer 1974
-*-
Oh my goodness, Bradbury`s writing and descriptions are
so beautiful and vivid. It is like being transported into a whole new world, that is
dreamlike and filled with excitement.
It all feels so alive, my inside self and also the outside world!-*-
It is the summer of 1928 in Green Town, Illinois. Douglas Spaulding, twelve, is about to discover in many different ways that this summer is 'vintage', unforgettable and memorable. A young Doug will learn the many sides of life, the power of friendship, the value of giving, the magic of belief and also the glance of a bittersweet future - all this in one summer [
'a summer of unguessed wonders'].
"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." -*-
Here`s a beautiful song, for those hot summers with no breeze...
sing along... 🎵 🎙 🎵 🎙 🎵 🎙
“Air, air . . .
who will buy this air . . .
Air like water and air like ice . . .
buy it once and you’ll buy it twice . . .
here’s the April air . . .
here’s an autumn breeze . . .
here’s papaya wind from the Antilles . . .
Air, air, sweet pickled air . . .
fair . . .
rare . . .
from everywhere . . .
bottled and capped and scented with thyme,
all that you want of air for a dime!” -*-
| Profound | Brilliant | Splendid | Magical | Expressive | Mysterious | Scary | Poetic | Loving | Vivid | Memorable |Bradbury`s
Dandelion Wine is all this and much much more. Come, discover and relish this unforgettable, stimulating and delicious experience!
-*-
From the notes:
==========
Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.
==========
In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.
==========
And, after all, isn’t that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people’s heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that’s how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that.
==========
In this instant it was an individual problem seeking an individual solution. He must accept being alone and work on from there.
==========
He realized that all men were like this; that each person was to himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid.
==========
Life was a horror lived in them at night, when at all sides sanity, marriage, children, happiness, were threatened by an ogre called Death.
==========
She sat down next to him on the swing, in her nightgown, not slim the way girls get when they are not loved at seventeen, not fat the way women get when they are not loved at fifty, but absolutely right, a roundness, a firmness, the way women are at any age, he thought, when there is no question.
==========
A cool soft fount; Grandfather imagined it tickling his legs, spraying his warm face, filling his nostrils with the timeless scent of a new season begun, with the promise that, yes, we’ll all live another twelve months.
==========
A walk on a spring morning is better than an eighty-mile ride in a hopped-up car, you know why? Because it’s full of flavors, full of a lot of things growing. You’ve time to seek and find.
==========
Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hem-lock.
==========
“Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away.”
==========
“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. In one hour, I’ve done a lot of thinking. I thought, Leo Auffmann is blind! … 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.”
==========
“No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you’re nine, you think you’ve always been nine years old and will always be. When you’re thirty, it seems you’ve always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You’re in the present, you’re trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.”
==========
“Be what you are, bury what you are not,”
==========
For John was running, and this was terrible. Because if you ran, time ran. You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper. When you weren’t looking, the sun got around behind you! The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing! You could stretch a day to three days, sure, just by watching!
==========
“It’s not you I worry about,” said Douglas, “It’s the way God runs the world.” Tom thought about this for a moment. “He’s all right, Doug,” said Tom. “He tries.”
==========
“The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you’re seventeen you know everything. When you’re twenty-seven if you still know everything you’re still seventeen.”
==========
this fine first cool white snow would never melt, but live a thousand summers.
==========
“What ever happened to happy endings?” “They got them on shows at Saturday matinees.” “Sure, but what about life?” “All I know is I feel good going to bed nights, Doug. That’s a happy ending once a day. Next morning I’m up and maybe things go bad. But all I got to do is remember that I’m going to bed that night and just lying there a while makes everything okay.”
==========
“A good night’s sleep, or a ten-minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine, Doug. You listen to Tom Spaulding, M.D.”
==========
“Tom, a couple weeks ago, I found out I was alive. Boy, did I hop around. And then, just last week in the movies, I found out I’d have to die someday.
==========
One day you discover you are alive. Explosion! Concussion! Illumination! Delight!==========
Rating: really liked it
"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."-Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Ingredients1 quart yellow dandelion blossoms, well rinsed
1 gallon boiling water
1 (.25 ounce) package active dry yeast
1 orange, sliced
1 lemon slice
DirectionsPlace dandelion blossoms in the boiling water, and allow to stand for 4 minutes. Remove and discard the blossoms, and let the water cool to 90 degrees F (32 degrees C).
Stir in the yeast, sugar, orange slices, and lemon slice; pour into a plastic fermentor, and attach a fermentation lock. Let the wine ferment in a cool area until the bubbles stop, 10 to 14 days. Siphon the wine off of the lees, and strain through cheesecloth before bottling in quart-sized, sterilized canning jars with lids and rings. Age the wine at least a week for best flavor.*
ReviewPeriodically this year I've been revisiting the great novels of my youth. I can't escape Ray Bradbury. He was the Michael Chabon of my childhood. He taught me to see magic in seasons and find miracles in the ordinary moments in the day. This is another Bradbury reread from 30 years ago that has improved with age. Add sugar and nostalgia and time. Let life ferment you for 30 years. Come back to his delicate, nuanced prose. Read his sweet notes of youth, of a past infused with both sunshine and magic and see if you don't add a couple stars to your re-read.
Reading this on the Fourth of July was nearly perfect. This book, bookended a day filled with family BBQs, fireworks, community festivals, apple pie and icecream. The book bottles youth, Summer, Americana, etc. It is a love note to being alive, being young, and flirting with the knowledge that life IS fleating, Summer ends, friends move, loved ones die, and there are no machine of happiness. Just 93 days, 15 hours, and 38 minutes of Summer in 2017 to be absorbed one day, one smell, one word at a time.
* stolen wholecloth from one Internet receipe machine or another. Look for the one that is smoking.
Rating: really liked it
“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.”
A magical, timeless summer in the life of a twelve-year-old boy named Douglas Spaulding.
Forewarning: this review might just be a series of fangirling comments with no real structure or order.
Halfway between being a novel and a series of vignettes, Dandelion Wine is Bradbury’s ode to summer - and if you know me at all, I kinda hate that season. And yet somehow Bradbury had me brimming with nostalgia for childhood summers when it seemed like anything was possible and that summer might just last forever. *wipes tear away*
In some ways I would compare this to Robert McCammon’s Boy’s Life, there are a lot of similar themes and it gave me that same feeling of magic - that magical realism where you can’t tell what is real and what is simply a young boy’s imagination. The descriptions and prose are mesmerising, you can almost smell, hear and see summer. And any book that evokes nostalgia for childhood memories is a winner in my eyes.
Surprisingly, one of the creepiest and most unsettling passages I’ve ever read was in here too! It really played on one of my biggest fears - a murderer following you home or trying to get into your house. I got goosebumps as Bradbury turned up the tension and really set me on edge.
It’s a book that reminds you that you’re ALIVE - right here, right now- and yes, people will die, friends move away, seasons end, but there’s always magic to be discovered in little everyday things. Does this also sound like another one of my favourite books?? The Thief of Always perhaps?? I think this type of story is really my favourite.
Already marking this one as one of my favourite books of the year. How I would love to spend my summer in Green Town.
5/5. (Because I can’t give five thousand!)
This book is so amazing that it made a summer-hater actually start to appreciate summer... and it also made her nostalgic for childhood summers. Bradbury just has this insane ability to convey emotions and settings. Will certainly be one of my fave books of the year!
Update: Reread in May 2020. Remains one of my favourite books of all-time!
Rating: really liked it
My introduction to the fiction of Ray Bradbury is
Dandelion Wine, his much-loved ode to small towns, summers and strangeness as only a twelve-year-old boy could discover it. Published in 1957, the book is not a short story collection per se but of the twenty-seven vignettes, ten had been published before: "Season of Disbelief" and "The Window" appeared in
Collier's in 1950, "A Story About Love" in
McCall's in 1951, "The Lawns of Summer" in
Nation’s Business in 1952, "The Swan" in
Cosmopolitan and "The Magical Kitchen" in
Everywoman’s Magazine in 1954, "The Trolley" in
Good Housekeeping in 1955, etc.
Bradbury's ability to enrapture me is divided between his marvelous curiosities (tinkerers, time travel, ghosts, witchcraft, tarot cards, Death) and his prose, which is jeweled and beautifully captures the glow of a boy's summer. When it comes to a strong narrative or characters I could relate to, the book left me wanting, with most of the chapters or vignettes feeling more like what would fill three or four paragraphs of a book as it gears up or takes a break from its central story. If there are central characters, they would be Douglas Spaulding, a twelve-year-old boy and his ten-year-old brother Tom, who experience the summer of 1928 in their hometown of Green Town, Illinois.
From "Summer in the Air":
Well, he felt sorry for boys who lived in California where they wore tennis shoes all year and never knew what it was to get winter off your feet, peel off the iron leather shoes all full of snow and rain and run barefoot for a day and then lace on the first new tennis shoes of the season, which was better than barefoot. The magic was always in the new pair of shoes. The magic might die by the first of September, but now in late June there was still plenty of magic, and shoes like these could jump you over trees and rivers and houses. And if you wanted, they could jump you over fences and sidewalks and dogs.From "The Swan":
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 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.
That was the photograph; that was the way he knew her.From "The Tarot Witch":
Now Douglas knew why the arcade had drawn him so steadily this week and drew him still tonight. For there was a world completely set in place, predictable, certain, sure, with its bright silver slots, its terrible gorilla behind glass forever stabbed by waxen hero to save still more waxen heroine, and then the flipping waterfalling chitter of Keystone Kops on eternal photographic spindles set spiraling in darkness by Indian-head pennies under naked bulb light. The Kops, forever in collision or near-collision with train, truck, streetcar, forever gone off piers in oceans which did not drown, because there they rushed to collide again with train, truck, streetcar, dive off old and beautifully familiar pier. Worlds within worlds, the penny peek shows which you cranked to repeat old rites and formulas. There, when you wished, the Wright Brothers sailed sandy winds at Kittyhawk, Teddy Roosevelt exposed his dazzling teeth, San Francisco was built and burned, burned and built, as long as sweaty coins fed self-satisfied machines.From "Dinner at Dawn":
Whoever he was or whatever he was and no matter how different and crazy he seemed, he was not crazy. As he himself had often explained gently, he had tired of business in Chicago many years before and looked around for a way to spend the rest of his life. Couldn't stand churches, though he appreciated their ideas, and having a tendency toward preaching and decanting knowledge, he bought the horse and the wagon and set out to spend the rest of his life seeing it that one part of town had a chance to pick over what the other part of town had cast off. He looked upon himself as a kind of process, like osmosis, that made various cultures within the city limits available to one another. He could not stand waste, for he knew that one man's junk is another man's luxury.My favorite vignette in
Dandelion Wine is "The Swan", in which a young newspaper columnist named Bill Forrester impresses ninety-five year old Miss Helen Loomis with the way he orders at an ice cream parlor. An unlikely relationship blooms based on an old photo he finds that was taken in 1853, when Helen was twenty. The way the old woman makes the younger man feel experienced and worldly and the way the younger man makes her feel energetic and young is told with mesmerizing prose by Bradbury. His imagination and facility with language were tailor-made for the magazine format and while the book struggles to gel, I did enjoy reading it.
Length: 78,792 words
Rating: really liked it
Damn it! I just knew I would love this book. That’s what I get for thinking.
And almost everyone loves it. Oh well!
Mel 🖤🐶🐺🐾
Rating: really liked it
Um....ok so I totally hated this book. I hope someone out there can tell me why this is a good book. It's unique, sure, but it's just a mess of words. In reading the introduction, I felt like I got a sense of why that is. The author said he forced himself to word-dump every single morning - just writing as creatively etc as he could. Well, I think he just put those "creative" word-dumps together and called it a story. It has no story line, no voice, no character development, no point. The author just seems to want to hear himself write....
Rating: really liked it
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 ...
Rating: really liked it
Recently while moving bookcases, books and furniture around, I came across my copy of
Dandelion Wine .
I had read it once, years ago, during my own personal Golden Age of Science Fiction, ages 8 to 16. Now was a good time as any to revisit this novel. Bradbury had been marked, incorrectly, in my mind as a sci-fi writer on the same level as Heinlein or Asimov.
He's not a hard core,
I, Robot type of sci-fi writer, really. More like a fantasy writer who touched on sci-fi themes.
And, he's in his own league. There haven't been many authors like Bradbury, heart of a poet, imagination as great as any, and a style that is both comfortable and familiar to the reader and yet is still unique.
Dandelion Wine is in my opinion the most 'poetical' of anything I've read by him.
It's a pean to childhood joys and fears, a story of the rite of passage from young child to a more aware young man. The town, fictional, of Green Town is a nod to Bradbury's real home town of Waukegan, Illinois, as seen from the eyes of Douglas Spaulding, a 12 year old boy learning he is alive and mortal all in one summer.
The novel is a series of short stories about the town and its people, told mostly through Douglas or his younger brother, Tom. The Happiness Machine, the Green Machine, the old tarot witch, friends moving away, old ways coming to an end, new ways being noticed, and sometimes an old way being restored, death and life, all parade past on the pages of this luminous novel.
The Summer of 1928 is perfectly bottled and stored in the cellar, just waiting for someone to come down, open the cap, and breathe deep of the golden light, and let the feelings play around like incandescent beetles scattering in the bright summer sun.
It is nostalgic without being maudlin or self pitying. It is magical without being vulgar and ostentatious. It bobs and weaves around the darkness and light of being alive, of being young or old and, always at the center, of being human.
Bradbury is a master storyteller. He is at the top of his game as he casts a spell about the rite of passage for Douglas as he progresses from a simple child to be a more complex and self-reflecting young man.
I really can't give this book enough praise. It's delightful and thought-provoking. The themes are all known, but they are expressed with such skill and care that they don't feel old. Rather like the streets around your home after a spring rain. You know them, yes, but they are refreshed and clean.
I encourage you to get a copy and read it.
Rating: really liked it
Sure, it's overly sentimental and largely ignores the social problems of the time depicted, but when you're 12 years old in small-town America, there are no social problems. There are only problems regarding the new pair of tennis shoes you want, the creepy guy who hangs out in the ravine, the desire to live forever, to be young forever, to build the perfect happiness machine. Besides, Bradbury's writing is so rich it practically drips, much like biting into a perfectly ripe peach in August.
Rating: really liked it
¡apparently my 1,000th rating! I should be stoked at the milestone I guess, but I was really digging how that 999 looked under my avatar. maybe I should go back and un-rate something and then just keep doing that as needed.
Rating: really liked it
SO much better than Fahrenheit Thingy-Bobby.
Rating: really liked it
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.
