Book Review: Farewell Summer

Written by: Ray Bradbury Publisher: William Morrow

In the autumn of 1928, in Green Town, Ill., there was a war. An army of kids decided it was time to take the town back from a group of grouchy grandparents, most notably members of the school board, who were crushing their preteen spirit.

In this sequel to his much-loved 1957 novel Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury finds the children he left in Green Town again at the end of a summer. This time, though, Douglas Spaulding, his brother Tom and a group of their like-minded friends are stirring up trouble by pulling pranks designed to thwart the power of school board member Calvin Quartermain and his gang of geriatric killjoys.

With Bradbury’s rarefied prose lamenting another summer gone by and the return of the dreaded school year, the boys’ adventures, pranks, first kisses and bike rides down to the ravine are enough to bring out the barefoot 12-year-old in any reader. It’s strange, then, how the book meets its end—with an unsettling passage that finds both Douglas and his enemy Quartermain engaging in a distinctly private affair, bringing the former into adulthood and surprising the latter with his own virility. Not quite the fireworks-by-the-lake conclusion that the rest of the book merits. 

Final pages aside, however, this novel is well crafted and touching, as was its predecessor. There’s something about it, like the bells on an ice cream truck, that does feel just like the last weeks of August. So, not unlike Douglas Spaulding, you’ll be sad to see this Summer go.