Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

 

This is Bradbury writing at his most beautiful, his most nostalgic. It's a paean to his childhood: As the introduction makes clear, the difference between Green Town, Illinois (the town in the novel) and Waukegan, Illinois (where Bradbury grew up) is not all that big, even with one of them being fictional. There are hints of weirdness, there's arguably a thesis that magic (good and bad) is objectively real for children in ways it isn't for adults (though there are adults who at least seem to be interacting with magic). There are threads that get woven throughout, but this is a very episodic novel; I don't think it's quite a fix-up, but I do think I've seen some of the vignettes collected elsewhere. The pacing is a little on the languid side, but the characters feel pretty real, and the incidents feel lived. The voice ... Bradbury's prose is fricking magic. I can see drinking from this vintage repeatedly, and I regret that I somehow haven't tasted it before now.