Xfarewell Summer 3

Product Description
October first, the air is still warm, but fall is rolling in. Thirteen-year-old Douglas Spaulding, his younger brother Tom, and their friends do their best to take advantage of these last warm days, rampaging through the ravine, tormenting the girls, and declaring war on the old men who run Green Town, IL. For the boys know that Mr. Quartermain and his cohorts want nothing more than to force them to put away their wild ways, to settle down, to grow up. If only, the boys believe, they could stop the clock atop the courthouse building. Then, surely, they could hold onto the last days of summer–and their youth. But the old men were young once, too. And Quartermain, crusty old guardian of the school board and town curfew, is bent on teaching the boys a lesson. What he doesn’t know is that before the last leaf turns, the boys will give him a gift: they will teach him the importance of not being afraid of letting go.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This poignant, wise but slight “extension” of the indefatigable Bradbury’s semiautobiographical
Dandelion Wine picks up the story of 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding in October of 1928, when the warmth of summer still clings to Green Town, Ill. As in his episodic 1957 novel, Bradbury evokes the rhythms of a long-gone smalltown America with short, swift chapters that build to a lyrical meditation on aging and death. Playing at war, the imaginative Douglas and his friends target the town’s elderly men, and the outraged 81-year-old bachelor Calvin C. Quartermain attempts to organize a counterattack against the boys’ mischief. Rebelling against their elders—and the specter of age and death—Douglas and his gang steal the old men’s chess pieces before deciding that Time, as embodied by the courthouse clock, is their true nemesis. The story turns on a gift of birthday cake that triggers Douglas and Quartermain’s mutual recognition: “He had seen
himself peer forth from the boy’s eyes.” Soon thereafter, Douglas’s first kiss and new, acute awareness of girls serves as the harbinger of his inevitable adulthood. Bradbury’s mature but fresh return to his beloved early writing conveys a depth of feeling.
Look for a Q&A with Bradbury in the Aug. 21 issue.
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From Bookmarks Magazine
Ray Bradbury, now in his mid-80s, explains in his postscript that the original
Dandelion Wine manuscript included much of the material in
Farewell Summer. His publisher at the time thought the book too long, and advised Bradbury to shelve the latter half. He certainly took the advice to heart. Fifty years later, here comes this satisfying denouement, one that speaks to themes of youth, aging, memory, and regrets. Reviewers praise
Farewell Summer as an ideal swan song for a storied career that produced award-winning works like
Fahrenheit 451 and
Something Wicked This Way Comes and earned Bradbury the prestigious National Medal of Arts.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Ray Bradbury’s
Dandelion Wine has aged remarkably well, losing none of its nostalgic charm during the 49 years since its first printing. Writing sequels is something entirely new in Bradbury’s long career of perpetual creativity, and so his return to Green Town, Illinois, and the escapades of the author’s boyhood alter ego, Douglas Spaulding, is surprising as well as welcome. Whereas
Dandelion Wine takes the form of a series of interconnected tales,
Farewell Summer tells one unbroken story set during an autumnal heat wave in the year Douglas turns 14. Lamenting summer’s sudden passage, he and his childhood cronies decide to wage “war” against the senior tenants of the stately houses lining Green Town’s cavernous ravine. Intending to stop time in its tracks, the gang purloins chess pieces from the town square and sabotages the workings of the courthouse clock with fireworks. None