Sara's Reviews > Dandelion Wine

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.