Book Review: Dandelion Wine (Green Town, #1) by Ray Bradbury
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Dandelion Wine is an absolutely beautiful coming-of-age story. It’s a book I’ve owned for years, one I purchased second-hand when I realized that it was part of a series that included one of my favorite books, Something Wicked This Way Comes. But for some reason, I kept putting it off, fearing that it would somehow weaken the magical grip Something Wicked has on my heart. Instead, it strengthened it. This slim book is every bit as weirdly wonderful and inexpressibly nostalgic as its counterpart, weaving that same magical grip around my heart regarding the summer as Something Wicked did with autumn. It’s exactly what I’m always craving—but rarely find—when I venture into the realm of natural realism.
Bradbury’s prose is second to none. Something about his way with words paints the brightest yet softest pictures in the mind. If I had to describe his writing—specifically in the Green Town novels—in a single word, that word would be transcendental. This story is brilliantly, hopefully, joyously alive with it. Rapturously idyllic. As with Something Wicked this Way Comes, Bradbury makes me nostalgic for a time and place I’ve never known.
I love how the story begins, with our primary perspective, twelve year-old Douglas, waking the town on the first day of summer. He is waiting for this nameless something to happen. Something big. Something Alive. And yet, even in the midst of Douglas’s own beautiful summer days of his childhood, he’s filled with longing for the days of decades past and sorrow over how things are changing in his present. When you fully realize and grasp that you are alive, really alive, there is so much joy in the knowledge. And yet it’s also a finite, fragile joy, one that is tested when you also realize how finite and fragile that life can be. Because with the realization that you are truly alive comes a darker counterpoint—the knowledge that nothing lasts forever. Including you.
Spinning out from Douglas are a host of vignettes, scenes from various lives of those who call Green Town home. A lot happens over the course of this singular summer. We’re introduced to the Happiness Machine, which provides a tremendous, eerily prescient vision of how we treat our phones and social media today. It’s an eye-opening treatise on living in the moment and your place in the world instead of longing for the past or someplace where you’re not. There are portions like the heartbreakingly romantic story of Helen Loomis and Bill Forrester. And then the very next vignette, about Lavinia Nebbs, was a horror story in miniature, one that captured the feeling of terror perfectly. We meet Mr. Jonas, the junk man, who theorizes that the things we grow tired of aren’t junk; they’re someone else’s future treasures.
Sometimes progress is good. Necessary, even. But often, it is the death of art, of personal tradition, of joy and mystery and a host of other wonderful, magical things. Real growth is realizing when something new doesn’t work, and having the wherewithal to chuck it out and embrace the tried and true once more.
I love that the story ends where it begins, though so much has changed for Douglas. He puts Green Town to sleep on the last day of summer the same way he awakened it at the dawning of the first. Parts of this book struck me as hazy or ephemeral, but so did sections of Something Wicked this Way Comes the first couple of times I read it. Seeing clearly isn’t always best, anyway. Sometimes you need to just savor. Enjoy. Relish.
If you love coming-of-age stories, this is for you. If you’re a looking for a superb example of magical realism, this is for you. If you’ve been a fan of Ray Bradbury for decades, this is for you. If you’ve never dipped your toes into his body of work, this is for you. Basically, if you’re a reader, this book is for you. I adored everything about it, and am already looking forward to reading it again and again in the future. I’ll keep it stored away like my own little bottle of dandelion wine, a way to remember the summer when winter sets in. It will undoubtedly be one of my favorite books of the year.