"Dandelion Wine"

Filled with nostalgia, Dandelion Wine is a book specifically meant for summer-reading. Told in a voice filled with earnest longing for summers past, Ray Bradbury, the master of the sci-fi genre, penned this book after his home-town of Waukegan, Illinois. Part auto-biographical, this story takes place in the summer of 1928 in a little fictional town of Green Town, Illinois. 

 

The protagonist, Douglas Spaulding, is loosely based off Bradbury in this semi-autobiographical exploration of a time where innocence and simple joy of yesteryears co-existed with its citizenry. In the first few chapters, Douglas greets summer into his hometown with abandoned excitement. Here, we see behind Bradbury’s writing style and the intricate way he has created this world within Douglas Spaulding’s universe. 

 

Douglas wakes up that first day of summer to find the whole town still fast asleep. With a finger that he uses like a baton, Doug acts like a composer as he hears the first stirrings in his sleepy home. As he points to each inhabitant in his home, and the inhabitants in the far reaches of the town, each of them come alive as if awakened by Doug’s finger. 

 

This story is held together by a thread of vignettes and short stories that Bradbury had written over time. Told in Douglas Spaulding’s twelve-year-old voice, Dandelion Wine tracks Doug’s summer days. We see Douglas realize that HE IS ALIVE, and then counter-intuitively to that is that someday he must die. This is realized through Doug’s relationships with his companions that very summer. His losses and unparalleled gains create this reality: Life is bittersweet but you just got to live it. 

 

Immersed in tradition and cherished things, Dandelion Wine is the definition of a summer read.  Not your normal, everyday novel, Dandelion Wine is told in short vignette-like tales.  It was a little hard to get through, because of its short choppy scenes. But once you plough through the pages, it’s the unreal dialogue and moralistic attitude that every character carries that bothered me. This created flat characterization. Douglas and Tom Spaulding, brothers in this novel, were both portrayed in the same one-dimensional aspect.  They were hard to discern from one another, and this too was bothersome.  It seemed Bradbury was using the characters as a device to carry out a message. This made the characters and everything else in the novel seemed too contrived.  Although this novel does have a good message overall, it would be better if Bradbury left Dandelion Wine to its own devices, and just let the story organically fall into place.