Schizophrenic’s Guide: Dandelion Wine (Book Review)

I, Dalton Lewis, finished reading a book by Ray Bradbury called Dandelion Wine. It’s about a young man who obsesses about life and death. He is twelve years old in 1928. He eats ice cream, talks to old people about their experiences, and learns about the Civil War from them — because they were there and could tell him about it firsthand. Ray Bradbury mined from experiences from his own life in telling this very personal story. His fascination with horror and death show up in realistic ways in a story which is about real life and a real town in 1928.

Technology is an important theme in the book. The main characters, Gregory and Tom, want to create machines that will never break. They regret the demise of the local trolley and the way things change. They hate that things move and entropy destroys everything in existence. They love the local machines, like the ice cream machine or the tarot reading wax lady at the local carnival. They want the carnival lady to work and to never break, to give them information on what might happen in their lives.

I’ve been reading a lot of 40k novels about science fiction warfare in the far future, so this is a nice change of pace for me. There are hints of Bradbury’s fascination with horror and science fiction, but this story is a slice of life growing up. I find it interesting that a story can be about life and death without a lot of action sequences. A real story about a real person can have just as much meaning and symbolism as an allegory with lots of fight scenes. A great-grandmother dying can have a real impact because it’s something that actually happens. A boy can grow up in a Chicago suburb because that’s something that affects us because we know reality when we read it — and we conversely know bullshit when we read it. A sad story about a superhero saving the universe is not as impactful as a story about a boy learning that, in the end, everyone dies horribly.

I am also almost finished writing my own novel, and this one is a horror novel in which characters have to deal with some death or misfortune of some kind. I want to show the way people can create something meaningful out of a disaster or horrible situation. People remember the fallen, and that is an important facet of the novel I am writing. I want to show the world a set of characters who feel impacted strongly by death and dying. I think that Dandelion Wine also does that in a very different way.

I want to read more books. I want to read and review a different novel every week until the end of the year. I read a different book about a week ago, Storm of Iron, and although I won’t review it, I will say that it is a quite good book about a siege. It involves a lot of interesting characters and intelligently shows both sides of a huge and terrible battle. I am glad to have read two good books in April and want to continue to read a book a week moving forward.

Thanks, and take care, friends.