Farewell Summer

By: Ray Bradbury

Narrated by: Robert Fass

The master of American fiction returns to the territory of his beloved classic, Dandelion Wine - a sequel 50 years in the making

Some summers refuse to end...

October 1st, the end of summer. The air is still warm, but fall is in the air. 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 Colonel 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.

Public Domain (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers

Love Ray Bradbury

A really good, imaginative tale. The story draws you into it quickly, and you can hardly wait to hear some more. Thanks for writing this for me.

Basic story about boyhood summer

Audible is now Requiring text reviews if you want to leave a star review. I don't know about you, but I make star reviews to remind myself which authors and narrators I do and don't like. I don't like being forced to leave a text review. I hope Audible fixes this soon.

Just weird and not in a good way.

This is the follow-up story to dandelion wine but I wish I had stopped with that book. It was much darker than dandelion wine and filled with stories about how the boys terrorized the community and the old folks in it. I liked the Afterword written by the author better than the story itself and his explanation of how farewell summer came to be.
dandelion wine made me want to read more by Ray Bradbury. Farewell to Summer was sad and bizarre... and not in the same way that Something Wicked This Way Comes was bizarre, but bizarre in that it was almost the opposite of the glorious descriptive, enthusiastic brightness of Dandelion Wine.

I'm glad there was an afterward

This little book starts off feeling undeveloped. I wondered if it was something found in his files after he did that wasn't released because he knew it wasn't ready.

But the book kept getting better right up to the last paragraph. It is a satisfying but not great novella. ell done Ray Bradbury.

Part of the.problem is it looks like a piece of something else that wasn't intended to stand alone. Well, the afterward says that is what it is. It was part of Dandelion Wine and Bradbury said the whole book was too long. They told him he could keep this excised part to develop and publish on its own. He said it has taken 50 years to develop to what it is.

Now it makes sense and I'm glad he did publish it. It is a nice expansion of Dandelion Wine. Well done you great author.

The third, final, Green Town story

In the afterword, Ray Bradbury describes how he always saved the title, Farewell Summer, for his final return to Green Town - the imaginarily enriched version of his boyhood in Illinois- and old age.

The two preceding novels - Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes - are among my favorite books for mixing mystery, memory and a bit of poetry and philosophical allegory on childhood. The storytelling is magical and (even of sometimes a bit heavy handed in their symbolism), moving.

For me, the style of Dandelion Wine was slightly strange at first, like a puzzle of its own. I needed to find the rhythm of Bradbury’s prose, before truly losing myself in it. The key, for me, was drifting into a seamless mix of boys’ imagination, considerations and feelings, blended with the possibility of magic, and life remembered from a small town in the early 20th century. While Bradbury is most famous for his science fiction, these sorts of stories are my favorites.