Dandelion Wine

I recently finished reading Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, and I highly recommend it to all of you. As I said in a previous post, it's one of those books that makes me feel like "it was written for me." On the one hand, the story(ies) could be seen as "simple": the dynamics between parents and children, siblings, friends, older and younger generations. Many if not most of the characters talk in this Beaver Cleaver way with phrases like, "Aw shucks, Dad! God darn it! I really wanted that baseball card!" And you can picture some 1957 boy pumping his fist and stomping his tennis shoed foot inside a quaint little barbershop. But what's powerful about this book--and seductive and sad and magical--is that almost every situation gets turned on its head, so the reader is left with a feeling of melancholy and slight disturbia. Characters regret their words; children get lost in the ravine; old women accept their age -- and their approaching deaths; a tarot card dispensing witch glassed inside a carnival machine may or may not really be a touch alive, and you don't quite know if it's magic, surrealism, or "just" Douglas's, the 12-year-old protagonist's, imagination. There is a feeling of Darkness throughout the novel, an almost literal force of nature that is part God, part changing-of-the-seasons from summer to autumn, and part shadowy bogeyman who seems to both slumber and awaken in the town of Greenfield, IL's ravine. In the end, this is a coming-of-age novel where a boy starts to become a man, and both loses and gains so much in the process. Hard truths only come from suffering, even if that suffering is in a glance, a conversation gone awry, a friend moving away and making one forget about the awesome taste of ice cream.

I am currently reading Bradbury's sequel to Dandelion Wine, Farewell Summer. It came out in 2006 (49 years after the original), and it seems fitting for me that I don't have to wait 49 years but get to jump from Part 1 of the story immediately to Part 2. I also am looking forward to Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Illustrated Man, which are on my bookshelf. (I have hazy, crazy images of the film version of Something Wicked This Way Comes, and I bet it would make a really cool double feature with Return to Oz. Both are kids-movies-that-aren't-really-for-kids.)

Have any of you read Ray Bradbury? The guy's 90 and still pumping out these amazing works! He is one of my new favorites....

....And up next, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre followed by Bram Stoker's Dracula. I'm on a classics kick.