"Dandelion Wine": What books remind you of summer?

In the dead of winter, what’s better than a taste of summer? You could have ice cold lemonade, but there’s that whole “cold” thing. Or you can put on your bathing suit, but that also has numerous drawbacks. Instead, how about a book that brings summer back to you?

Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine bottles up the summer of 1928 for all time.

The Fab 5 met to talk about it during a December snow drought. Our hostess lives a ways out, so we were glad about that. We told her we’d only drive to her house in the wintertime if she promised to decorate their mounted bear for Christmas. She obliged.

Dandelion Wine seems to be a novel that draws deeply on the author’s childhood in small-town Illinois. Most of Bradbury’s work is science fiction,, and we were surprised to find that this novel is often categorized as science fiction as well. I wouldn’t call it sci-fi, but sometimes it borders on magical realism.

Douglas Spaulding is twelve years old and has the entire summer spread out before him. He determines to pay attention, to notice things. His eyes are beginning to open to life, mortality, and the temporal nature of things. Through Bradbury’s descriptions, you can smell, feel, taste summer.

You’ll also be reminded of how different a young boy’s life is now. Douglas and Tom are watching things change before their eyes. The town’s trolley is being swapped out for buses. People are growing up, growing old, and dying. And the boys are observing their neighbors intently, finding surprises for the better and worse.

We were reminded of Olive Kitteridge in that this novel is actually a collection of stories all related by time, setting and recurring characters.

Sonya’s favorite story was about an elderly woman, Helen, and a young man named Bill who develop a close connection. They come to wonder if they are soulmates who have been meeting each other at the wrong time in their lives and that someday maybe they’ll be reborn as agemates as well, so that they can be together. It’s very sweet. Sort of reminds me of the Ben Folds song “The Luckiest.”

We were not sucked into the story right away. It took a while to catch our interest, several of us citing the story about 1/5 of the way in about another elderly woman who is visited by some little girls who refuse to believe she’d ever been young. It’s kind of sad; the woman decides that they are right—she is not the same person anymore, and there is no point to holding onto all of the mementos she has saved up, because they cannot make her that person. This was particularly hard for one of us to take, since she has a natural tendency to save up some mementos of her own!

The book grew on me as I read it, and I am happy I did. What books remind you of summer?