The best way to convey the wide-eyed lyrical and visionary worldview of the book is to quote the opening passage in which Doug conjures the summer of 1928 into being. This is a good idea, it adds to the sense of everything being seen in one continuous stream of consciousness by an excited, questing, thoughtful 12-year-old boy, the centre of the text and hero of most (but not all) the stories, young Doug Spaulding. Breaks between stories are only indicated by white spaces between blocks of text. However, there are no chapter breaks or numbers or titles: the text just flows on in one great seamless flood.

It’s quite easy to guess that a lot of these were originally published as separate stories, though Bradbury wrote linking passages incorporating them into Doug and Tom’s world – and also wrote half a dozen or so stories – specifically for this, the book version. The book consists of twenty or so incidents, ranging from short dialogues between Doug and Tom, to lengthy descriptions of specific incidents, with two or three longer self-contained stories about people not related to the Spaldings.

Dandelion Wine is a rich, lyrical, sometimes sentimental, sometimes visionary description of this long summer and its events – from the humdrum to the horrifying – which mark it. Douglas Spaulding is 12, his brother Tom is ten, they live with mum and dad and in the house opposite live Grandpa and Grandma.

It is the summer of 1928 in Green Town, Illinois, population 26,349.

Ray bradbury dandelion wine review