Product Description

An endearing classic of childhood fancies and memories of an idyllic Midwestern summer from America's most beloved storyteller.

Dandelion Wine

Ray Bradbury's moving recollection of a vanished golden era remains one of his most enchanting novels. DANDELION WINE stands out in the Bradbury literary canon as the author's most deeply personal work, a semi-autobiographical recollection of a magical small town summer in 1928.

Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole wide world that lies beyond the city limits. It is a pair of brand-new tennis shoes, the first harvest of dandelions for Grandfather's renowned intoxicant, the distant clang of the trolley's bell on a hazy afternoon. It is yesteryear and tomorrow blended into an unforgettable always. But as young Douglas is about to discover, summer can be more than the repetition of established rituals whose mystical power holds time at bay. It can be a best friend moving away, a human time machine who can transport you back to the Civil War, or a sideshow automaton able to glimpse the bittersweet future.

Come and savor Ray Bradbury's priceless distillation of all that is eternal about boyhood and summer.

Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole wide world that lies beyond the city limits. It is a pair of brand-new tennis shoes, the first harvest of dandelions for Grandfather's renowned intoxicant, the distant clang of the trolley's bell on a hazy afternoon. It is yesteryear and tomorrow blended into an unforgettable always. But as young Douglas is about to discover, summer can be more than the repetition of established rituals whose mystical power holds time at bay. It can be a best friend moving away, a human time machine who can transport you back to the Civil War, or a sideshow automaton able to glimpse the bittersweet future.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #996721 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-01
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
World-renowned fantasist Ray Bradbury has on several occasions stepped outside the arenas of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. An unabashed romantic, his first novel in 1957 was basically a love letter to his childhood. (For those who want to undertake an even more evocative look at the dark side of youth, five years later the author would write the chilling classic Something Wicked This Way Comes.)

Dandelion Wine takes us into the summer of 1928, and to all the wondrous and magical events in the life of a 12-year-old Midwestern boy named Douglas Spaulding. This tender, openly affectionate story of a young man's voyage of discovery is certainly more mainstream than exotic. No walking dead or spaceships to Mars here. Yet those who wish to experience the unique magic of early Bradbury as a prose stylist should find Dandelion Wine most refreshing. --Stanley Wiater

From Library Journal
This 1957 gem is the latest in Avon's ongoing series of Bradbury reprints. This sweet little hardcover features the full text of the novel?the story of one magical summer in the life of 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding?along with an introduction by the author. Without flash or best-sellerdom, Bradbury has emerged as one of this country's great writers, and libraries lacking a quality hardcover of his beloved novel should jump on this.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Bradbury is an authentic original." -- Time


From the Paperback edition. -- Review

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Customer Reviews

Summer, 1928
Magical. If the word 'magical' didn't exist, we would have to invent it in order to properly describe Ray Bradbury's DANDELION WINE. The premise is absurdly simple: one summer in a small Midwestern town during the late 1920's. On the surface it doesn't look like a lot to hang a novel on, but Bradbury puts so much heart, soul and, yes, love into his words that I defy anyone to call it an empty book. Bradbury has always written superbly for children, and slipping his characters into his own nostalgic childhood succeeds on virtually every level.

I've always preferred Bradbury's short stories to his full novels, yet here he successfully manages to have his cake and eat it too. Most of the chapters are self-contained little story segments. In fact, I had come across portions of this book in short story collections, and had no idea that they were smaller parts of a larger work. Yet DANDELION WINE is much more than just a collection of stories. The children and adults alike grow and change as the summer days burn and then fade. Just like a real season, some events are disconnected from the rest and can involve seldom seen people, while other proceedings are intrinsically linked to their peers.

The book itself is fairly difficult to sum up; every definition that I've tried coming up with has omitted several major elements. Of course, any summary that tried to include everything would be far too long and would contain none of the magic of the text. Children discover some fundamental and universal truths for the first time. Adults deal with their own fears and their own nightmares. And, of course, there are the usual wonderful collection of Bradbury eccentrics and strangers. Children are filled with awe and recognizably childlike without being annoying or unrealistic. There really are too many great little moments in this book to go into huge amounts of detail. To mention a handful of great things is to omit the other wonderful moments. Just like most perfect summers, the book isn't great because of one or two gigantic epics, but because of small quiet little days. From the silent thrill of feeling the grass beneath one's feet to the heartbreak at finding a lover at a point far too late in life, DANDELION WINE contains a huge amount of diversity under the cohesive umbrella of a typical summer. Two disparate events can be quite different in both content and feel, but Bradbury is more than talented enough to make them both feel like part of the same summer.

DANDELION WINE has a passion for childlike exuberance and the wonder of first discoveries all wrapped up in a healthy portion of nostalgic longing. This book is really a series of parts, but manages to add up to more than their sum. Like individual summer days, they can be appealing on their own, but taken as a whole the result is magical.

Vintage Bradbury Fantasy Is My Favorite
DANDELION WINE is first and foremost the story of a 12 year old boy discovering that he is alive. I was lucky enough to read this gorgeous, perfect novel, wrapped in a library's dandelion yellow hardcover, the summer of my 12th year, in the small town of New Haven, Indiana, probably wearing my own pair of Red Ball Jets or Keds, lying in my living room as usual, curled up in a chair with the screen door open to let in the blustery summer wind and sun, with the lush green Indiana grass blowing in waves just outside.

I understood what Bradbury was saying at age 12, an incredible thing in itself, since the themes here are fairly grown-up. Essentially, this book is about a boy flooded with the sudden realization of his own "aliveness", and never has a child's experience of innocent living been so perfectly, passionately illustrated. Douglas Spaulding lying in the grass, or feeling the keen pleasure and pain of carrying heavy laden buckets of self-picked berries out of the woods while the handles crease the insides of his hands. Douglas Spaulding discovering the wonder of a Number Two pencil, and the joy of rising early in the morning to watch his town come to life with the sunrise. Douglas Spaulding discovering that nothing makes a boy fly weightless through his summer vacation better than slipping his feet into the cool, cloudwrapped heaven of a new pair of tennis shoes.

I found this book, at age 12 and several times since, to be an experience ranking with the most important books about human life that I have ever read. Bradbury sees so much, and conveys the experiences so clearly that one knows what Douglas and Ray know by the end. This is a book about passion and joy and being fully alive from moment to moment. It is a sonnet to and affirmation of childhood and innocence of such persuasive power that it has become a key volume of my core library. I don't expect everyone to have such a trascendent experience in the reading, and not everyone is fortunate enough to read this book at as perfect a moment as I did. But it is undeniable in its power and equal to the greatest work Ray Bradbury has produced, in my opinion. I was fortunate enough to meet him and thank him for it while at college. But this book has meant more to me than I could tell him.

Give this to a boy you care about, or read it to evoke, soothe and elevate the child in you. It is pure poetry, Bradbury at the height of his powers, written with genius, on the vital topic of the nature of life. I can only say Douglas Spaulding has never left me. You may find him equally provocative.

One of Bradbury's best.
I've never been able, when asked, to declare a "favorite" book; depending on mood, weather, politics, this can change in a moment.

Until now.

I'm almost ashamed to admit that I'd never read Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury, until this morning. Honestly, I just never got around to it -- mainly because a largely autobiographical tale of growing up in Waukegan didn't seem as likely to thrill me as most of his more "traditional" genre work. Bradbury's one of my favorite writers, though, and I stumbled across a copy of Dandelion Wine for ten cents at an old bookstore, so I gave it a shot.

I think the simple reason behind its appeal to me is this: it's not a sci-fi book. It's not genre fantasy. But it IS fantastic, in the most real and most important way; it's one man's golden and heavily mythologized recollections of the summers of his boyhood, written with such quiet beauty that the mundane is transformed into high fantasy.

Bradbury explicitly addresses this concept with two of his motifs; the dandelion wine itself and Douglas' little notebook of extraordinary thoughts to accompany ordinary rituals embody the greatest strength of the book. Largely because I'm familiar with Bradbury's other work, I found myself constantly expecting a little dash of the mystical, the otherworldly, in the Lonely Man and the magical cooking of his grandmother -- but, of course, the only magic present is the magic that Bradbury can conjure up in memory. And it's enough.

Stephen King, in his best and most powerful work, has Bradbury's gift for making the prosaic into something poetic and eerie. I've always scorned King's forays into general fiction, mainly because it always felt to me like he was desperate for legitimacy, but also because I felt like he was betraying his gift. I'm not sure that's true, anymore. I think THIS is the book that Stephen King someday wants to write.

Heck, it's the book _I_ want to write.