Bradbury is simply a master wordsmith. Every time is a pleasure. At times I do get lost, but then a sentence or phrase will capture me with its eloquence. Thank you Mr Bradbury for your writing all these years. ( )

The 3rd in the Green Town series, but really just a sequel to Dandelion wine...an exciting re-encounter with the well loved characters from the first book.

While this was a good book...it wasn't as Bradbury as I was expecting. With a totally different feel and vibe than Dandelion wine, it was easy to forget at times this was a sequel.....it felt a bit too modern. I still enjoyed it...but, I do feel it paled a bit in comparison to the first 2 books in this series.....to Bradbury's work in general. The 50+yr gap in the writing of this sequel is apparent. ( )

This book, published in 2006, was a sequel to “Dandelion Wine.” Bradbury says that he brought a complete book titled “Summer Morning, Summer Night” and his publisher recommended they publish the first 90k words (which became “Dandelion Wine”) and save the rest for a future novel.
“All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.”
I read this story in my mid-forties and I went I sat down to read it again; I could recall the mood it created more than the plot. I felt transported to a simpler time, both in terms of youth, as well as a period that was pre-broadcast news, pre-cold war, and certainly pre-internet/social media. There’s a slender plot, it’s not much to base a novel on -- some young boys rebelling against some old men in a small town. The real strength is nostalgia, the melancholy, and the feelings that his style of writing evokes. The prose is dialog heavy and sits somewhere between poetry and traditional language. With many of Bradbury’s similar works, such as “October Country,” “Something Wicked this Way Comes,” or “From the Dust Returned” I often fall out of the story, appreciating his metaphors, or turn of phrase, or even just word choice. It’s a tradeoff between losing the ‘mind-movie’ in my head, but fully enjoying the crafty prose.
“It rose above town like a great dark burial mound, drawn to the skies by the summoning of the moon, calling out in a grieved voice of days long gone, and days that would come no more, whispering of other autumns when the town was young and all was beginning and there was no end.”
I will say the ending caught me off guard, I had no recollection of it from my first read. Perhaps I’m too immature to appreciate it, but it made me smirk and chuckle. I won’t spoil it, but it wraps up the theme of the sequence of coming of age and coming of death, or the passing of the ‘torch’ in a most unusual way.
Four colorful stars, transitioning from lemon yellow to burnt orange, for this final Bradbury novel that connects the turn of the seasons to cycle of human life. ( )

I love Bradbury so I'm not going to say TOO much... Not a bad ending to a book that just tries too hard. I had the feeling throughout the novel that Bradbury was trying to be Bradbury and this kept distracting me. And all you Kindle Paperwhite and Fire HDX users can blow me! Stick with [b:Dandelion Wine|50033|Dandelion Wine|Ray Bradbury|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1374049845s/50033.jpg|1627774].

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Wistful and understated, especially in comparison to Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Those two books celebrate the exuberance of youth as seen through the eyes of a young boy in Bradbury's fictional Green Town, Illinois. This one combines a coming of age story with the reflections of a village elder looking back over a long life near its end. It's touching in a bittersweet sort of way when you consider it was Bradbury’s last published novel. ( )