A long, long time ago, 55 years to be exact, Ray Bradbury wrote a book about a young boy in a Midwestern town:
“It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.
“Douglas Spaulding, 12, freshly wakened, let summer idle him on its early-morning stream. Lying in his third-story cupola bedroom, he felt the tall power it gave him.”
So began “Dandelion Wine,” Bradbury’s semi-autographical ode to being young in 1928. After the long wait for a sequel to the 1957 book, the author of “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Martian Chronicles” and “The Illustrated Man,” among other classics of fantasy, now 86, returns us to Green Town, Ill., where Doug has one sneaker-clad foot in childhood and the other tentatively toeing manhood.
“Farewell Summer” opens this way:
“There are those days which seem a taking in of breath which, held, suspends the whole earth in its waiting. Some summers refuse to end.”
This lilting novel, whose cadence is like a poem or fable or bedtime story for adults, does more than mark those times when autumn should rule but summer won’t let go. It captures the sometimes slow, sometimes abrupt changes that turn boys to men and the way old men regretfully acknowledge that something unwanted, if not wicked, this way comes.
It is our pleasure, too, to be startled once more by his beautifully crafted prose and to join him in yet another grand adventure.
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