Thursday, January 31, 2019

Books read in 2019: No. 6 -- Dandelion Wine

by Ray Bradbury

Started: Jan. 25
Finished: Jan. 31

Notes: I have a mixed relationship with Bradbury's writing. While his Something Wicked This Way Comes is one of my all-time favorite novels and I enjoyed Fahrenheit 451, I was less than impressed by The Martian Chronicles. So I'm trying him out again. However, though he was famed for his science fiction and speculative novels, Dandelion Wine is apparently more of a literary work, a fictional memoir of a boy back in the 1920s.

Mini review: The writing here is quite good, but fans of Bradbury's science fiction might be disappointed. It's not really a novel, but more of a collection of short stories and vignettes based around a pair of brothers in the summer of 1928, though the main character does learn and grow throughout. This is quaint, potentially overly self-indulgent daydreaming about youth. There's nothing wrong with that if that is what one seeks in their fiction or at least occasionally in one's fiction. I'll repeat that the writing is good, perhaps some of Bradbury's best, but it wasn't really what I was in the mood for, and because of that I try not to judge it too harshly.

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